Eye on Britain
Sunday, May 31, 2009
British teacher makes pupils kneel and pray to Allah' during RE lesson
School denies it but fires the teacher anyway! One of the stranger examples of a British "fudge"
A teacher has been sacked after parents claimed that their children were forced to pray to Allah during a religious education lesson. Alison Phillips was accused of giving two pupils detention after they refused to kneel down and 'pray to Allah' during the class. However, an investigation by the school concluded that there was no truth in the allegation.
Parents were outraged after stories emerged that the two boys, aged 11, were allegedly punished for not wanting to take part in a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped. They said children should not be forced to take part in the exercise, which included wearing Muslim headgear, was a breach of their human rights. But governors at Alsager High School, near Stoke-on-Trent, denied Mrs Phillips made pupils pray or that two boys were put into detention for refusing to do so.
The school suspended the teacher last July after receiving complaints and a lengthy disciplinary process was carried out. A statement released on behalf of the school by Cheshire East Council said: 'It can be confirmed that following a long and rigorous disciplinary process, a member of staff at Alsager School has been dismissed from her post. 'The member of staff was suspended in July 2008 following parental complaints and newspaper reports relating to an RE lesson.
'In reaching this decision, the governing body wish to make very clear that they were completely satisfied that at no point did that member of staff make children pray to Allah or put boys in detention for refusing to do so. 'The RE lesson in question contains an element of role play which complies with acceptable practice.'
At the time of the alleged incident, one parent - Sharon Luinen, said: 'This isn't right, it's taking things too far. 'Being asked to pray to Allah, who isn't who they worship, is wrong and what got me is that came away thinking they were being disrespectful.' Another parent, Karen Williams, said: 'I am absolutely furious and I don't find it acceptable. 'I haven't got a problem with them teaching my child other religions and a small amount of information doesn't do any harm. 'But not only did they have to pray, the teacher had gone into the class and asked them watch a short film and then said "we are now going out to pray to Allah".'
The grandfather of one of the pupils in the class added: 'It's absolutely disgusting, there's no other way of putting it.' Parents had claimed that their children were made to bend down on their knees on prayer mats which the teacher had got out of her cupboard.
SOURCE
10,000 penpushers a year are hired by British local councils
And guess who pays for them?
Town halls have hired more than 30,000 extra staff over the past three years, figures revealed yesterday. The workers, mostly penpushers and bureaucrats, were also given higher pay rises than teachers, policemen or firemen.
According to a breakdown of council finances, between 2006 and 2008 the number of teachers employed fell but the number of `other local government staff' increased by 31,000, from 1,084,000 to 1,115,000. They also enjoyed the highest pay rises of any council group, up by 7.6 per cent in 2006, 7.2 per cent in 2007 and 3.3 per cent in 2008, the Department of Communities and Local Government figures showed.
`Other local government' workers include school support staff and others whose jobs directly serve the public. However, town halls also employ highly-paid managers and a growing army of equality officers, outreach workers and sustainability advisers.
Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: `Councils need to get back in touch with what people want and start focusing on delivering better frontline services and cutting back bloated administrations.'
And Tory local government spokesman Caroline Spelman said: `It is very telling that under Gordon Brown the number of teachers being employed is falling while the number of people employed to deal with red tape and bureaucracy is soaring.'
SOURCE
NHS Doctors have cashed in on new bonus scheme but it 'has not helped patient care'
A lucrative bonus scheme for GPs has done nothing to improve patient care, a study claims. Performance-related pay could even be detrimental to the NHS, with GPs chasing targets 'at the cost of the quality of care given to patients'. The bonus scheme was included as part of GPs' 2004 contract, which has seen pay rocket by 55 per cent to almost 108,000.
Ministers introduced the scheme, which accounts for a third of doctors' salaries, with the aim of driving up the quality of care. But a study in the British Medical Journal indicates that in some cases it has made no difference whatsoever - despite costing taxpayers millions.
Researchers at Birmingham University compared the level of diabetes care at 147 surgeries covering one million patients across the country. They found that while there were significant improvements every year in the three years up to the start of the bonus scheme, these improvements then stagnated after it began. It is suggested this could be because GPs stop trying for further improvements once they have achieved the maximum amount of money allocated to diabetes patients.
Under the scheme, known as the Quality and Outcomes Framework, points are awarded for the management of diabetes, including targets for controlling blood pressure, cholesterol and blood glucose levels. There are 1,000 points available annually for each practice, covering a wide range of different illness achievement targets. Each point is worth up to 124 and is then shared between GPs in that practice.
But experts say it is too easy for GPs to gain the maximum number of points and suggest targets need to be more challenging if patients are to see better care. Last year 96.8 per cent of doctors gained the maximum number of points and more than 600 practices achieved 100 per cent.
Dr Melanie Calvert, lecturer at Birmingham University's college of medicine and dentistry, said: 'Our work and that of others highlights the potential unintended consequences of the scheme and raises concerns that it may not have been as efficient in reducing inequalities in health in diabetes as was hoped. 'Although the management of patients with diabetes has improved since the 1990s, the impact of the pay-for-performance initiative on care is not straightforward.' She went on: 'If anything, improvements in care appear to have plateaued since the introduction. 'This may reflect increasing difficulties in target attainments in poorly- controlled patients, but could also suggest that targets for practices need to be more challenging if patients are to benefit.'
Last year a study by the Civitas think-tank found some GPs were putting more effort into treating conditions, including asthma and high blood pressure, that attract points while neglecting dementia and osteoporosis, which do not. Dr Calvert said: 'There is a risk that doctors are focusing on patients they can achieve incentives with and are not focusing on things like osteoporosis which isn't captured in the QOF. 'There is a risk GPs are focusing on tick boxes to meet targets but not focusing on other aspects of care.'
A Department of Health spokesman said: 'Independent research has shown that care for people with diabetes improved more rapidly after the introduction of the QOF. 'We want to see continuous improvements in QOF to support GPs in delivering high quality care for patients.'
SOURCE
British academics want to boycott visa 'snooping'
This is mostly just self-righteous posing that will collapse like a deflated balloon in due course. The Home Office has said that it will remove their accreditation to take overseas students if they do not comply and that would be a big hit to their revenues. Keeping records of attendance at tutorials is already common in some disciplines so extending that to all disciplines should not be onerous
University academics say they will boycott new visa rules for overseas students that would make them into "immigration snoopers". Delegates at the University and College Union's annual conference said they did not want to become a branch of the UK Border Agency.
Under the new rules universities are expected to monitor whether overseas students really attend their courses. The Home Office said such things were part of their normal duty of care. Institutions must also report concerns that a student could be involved in terrorism.
In a debate at the conference, in Bournemouth, delegates argued that the rules would place a strain on the relationship between staff and students from outside the European Union. General secretary Sally Hunt said: "UCU members are educators not border guards." She said later: "Politically, UCU is absolutely opposed to this legislation and we know that many members have strong and principled moral objections as members of society and as professional educators. "One of the more pernicious effects of this new system will be to turn our members into an extra arm of the police force, placing monitoring and reporting responsibilities onto academic and support staff."
One of the resolutions tabled for discussion said the new system "makes educators into immigration snoopers which could damage UK education irreparably". It deplored "this pandering to anti-immigration racism" and committed the union to "non-compliance with all such policing and surveillance duties".
But a Home Office spokesman said: "Educational institutions have a duty of care to all their students and checking that they are attending and making progress in their studies is part of that responsibility. "The records we expect education providers to keep are those which most will keep for their own purposes anyway."
SOURCE
Britain's anti-immigration party: The other side
Mainstream media comments on the BNP are uniformly vituperative and often misleading. In the interests of balance, therefore, I put a case for the defence, written by J. P. Straley
I'm not a Brit, but as an American and an avid internet observer of the British scene, I have been fascinated to watch the rise of what might be an effective nationalist political party in Britain.
The British National Party, under its leader Nick Griffin, has been touting Britain's elections for Members of the European Parliament, to be held on June 4, as its breakthrough. It hopes to capture five MEP seats, with the possibility of a few more if all the cards fall its way. (Which seems to be happening, as the extraordinary U.K. House of Commons expenses scandal in Westminster engulfs ever more British MPs of all parties.)
Commenters in the Brit political blogosphere predict anywhere from zero to five seats, with three as the most common guess. Any seats at all will produce public funding for the party, a very substantial boost, and will raise their visibility in Britain.
It's happened before. Another small party, the United Kingdom Independence Party [UKIP], whose main plank is to take Britain out of the European Union, was very successful in the last MEP election. But UKIP contests few local elections in Britain. For the upcoming June 4 MEP election, polls show it losing ground. Part of this may be the difference in styles. BNP is a bit scruffy and makes a fuss, while UKIP appears to be much more urbane. Unhappy British voters-particularly former Labor voters-appear to like the fuss.
I know I'm not supposed to like the BNP. Because it openly states that ethnicity matters, the British press and TV treat the BNP as if it is toxic waste. The U.S. Mainstream Media follows suit, when it mentions the party at all. The BNP did rise out of the ashes of a more strident National Front Party, and some of its leaders allegedly have or have had radical links (sort of like Obama and Jeremiah Wright, although Griffin has distanced himself much more effectively). All I can say, at a distance of 3000 miles, what the BNP is actually saying and doing now looks rational, reasonable and pretty darn good to me.
Nationalist politics acknowledge the ethnic dimension of nations. Levelers assert there is no difference between peoples, and happily dilute-even replace-the heritage peoples of the West. Nowhere are they more active than in Britain.
I use the term "Heritage Peoples." This is intuitively obvious, but let us see what BNP says about being "British":
Indeed, in an April 23 quote, Griffin himself describes the ethnic quality of Britishness in plain language:
Many whites in Britain appear to be self-haters, and are quite happy to trade Cotswolds country churches for mosques and minarets. So you can imagine the calumny thrown at Griffin over this remark!
Indeed, the "racist" epithet is thrown at BNP every day. BNP replies that it prefers a truly multicultural world where British people are clearly British and peoples from other countries are likewise unmistakable in their provenance. This is not an original policy with BNP, of course-in the second half of the twentieth century colonies of whites throughout the third world were encouraged to pack up and leave.
The BNP's policies strike me as candid and accessible. Here, for instance, is BNP policy on immigration:
Here is a nationalist party that cherishes its Heritage People and states clearly the goal to retain the traditional ethnic balance of their nation. It recognizes the fact of the demographic tsunami-something even sensible observers in the U.S. shrink from doing. The BNP intends to halt the immigrant flood and roll back the replacement of its Heritage Peoples. What's wrong with that?
Clever use of the internet has partially defused the uniformly negative media coverage of BNP. The BNP site offers fresh material daily, and it pulls no punches with its stories. There is certainly interest in the site. According to Alexa internet ratings, the BNP has far, far more traffic than Conservatives, LibDems, or Labor.
The BNP forces are also masters of the You Tube media. A single Y-T inquiry with key word "BNP" yielded forty pages of listings, albeit there were many dissenting views such as the one with the uncivilized title, "BNP Are C_nts". Whichever side of the BNP divide you stand on, if you like your material in movie-form, it's ready for you.
By no means is BNP a wholly electronic communicator. In those area that offer promise, BNP organizers canvas door to door with pamphlets and face-to-face explanations why BNP says, "Britain first!" This year, for the European Parliament election, it has sent out 29 million pieces of mail!
British race-relation quangos and their fellow travelers in government are well-aware of the BNP and Griffin. In December 2004, he was arrested after a covert taping (by a BBC i.e. tax-funded operative) of a speech before a private gathering. BNP and Griffin identify the increasing Muslim population in Britain as one of the chief threats to the country, and in the December 2004 meeting he was captured on tape as suggesting that Islam was a ".wicked and vicious faith." He knew that he was treading the edge of the draconian Race Relations law, and further said he could possibly get seven years prison for such a statement. Government pursued just that course, charging four counts of "incitement to racial hatred." Griffin was eventually acquitted on all counts. Not surprisingly, the BNP proposes to abolish all restrictions on free speech, absent only ".common law restrictions on incitement to violence."
Another grim reminder of official antipathy: BNP membership-that is, membership in a democratic and legal political party-is grounds for local governments to sack police and teachers. In the fall of 2008 the party membership list was leaked, and many such firings occurred.
Is BNP a one-issue anti-immigration party? Widening its scope seems to have been a part of Griffin's leadership. The issues of EU membership (out now, please), trade (mild protectionism), job protection (part of the immigration and guest worker issue), crime (unshackle police, allow persons to resist an intruder without penalty), defense (small, competent forces, avoid foreign wars), energy (develop alternative fuels and energy, promote advanced nuclear power), environment, education, and health are all covered in the manifesto. All told BNP's policy seems to be fairly conventional nationalism, bent on internal improvement and de-emphasizing foreign involvement, with an added tinge of social democracy. Voters certainly have a choice-BNP policies are a rather stark contrast to the Lib-Lab-Con party line.
BNP strategy seems to be to build the party in disaffected regions (London boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, and Burnley northeast of Liverpool are examples), and let success in electing members to local offices (town and city "councilors") increase the appeal of their brand. BNP is eager for councilors to render good service to constituents, though of course some do poorly in the event-an artifact of governing versus merely opposing government) Electing local councilors builds the party machinery and provides experience in actual government for members, as well as building a positive picture to combat negative propaganda.
There are no BNP Members of Britain's Parliament at this time. It takes determination, organization, and grit to make an election-winning party from scratch. But the BNP is making progress:
Total votes in General Elections
1983 14,621
1987 553
1992 7,631
1997 35,832
2001 47,129
2007 192,748
Make no mistake, the BNP remains very much a minority party. The '05 results represent only 0.7% of the total voters, country-wide. But the 2007 Welsh showing was 4.3% of the vote, and in the '08 London Mayoral contest more than 5% of voters went BNP. The party has discrete areas of strength, and these are where it means to win MEP seats.
The stakes are high for Britain. Shall it retain its traditional identity, or become a collection of synthetic citizens, whose opinion is perhaps better polled as mere consumer preference?
It would be interesting to see a country-wide nationalist political party in the US so straightforward in its platform, and so effective in its party-building effort. If BNP are successful on June 4, it will be a lesson to patriots throughout Europe and the US.
Stay tuned, June 4 will be here before you know it!
SOURCE
Britain: "Hitler" image turns out to be Lenin
One hopes that somebody learned something from that:
There are pictures of Stalin using the "Fascist" salute too. Scroll down here
School denies it but fires the teacher anyway! One of the stranger examples of a British "fudge"
A teacher has been sacked after parents claimed that their children were forced to pray to Allah during a religious education lesson. Alison Phillips was accused of giving two pupils detention after they refused to kneel down and 'pray to Allah' during the class. However, an investigation by the school concluded that there was no truth in the allegation.
Parents were outraged after stories emerged that the two boys, aged 11, were allegedly punished for not wanting to take part in a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped. They said children should not be forced to take part in the exercise, which included wearing Muslim headgear, was a breach of their human rights. But governors at Alsager High School, near Stoke-on-Trent, denied Mrs Phillips made pupils pray or that two boys were put into detention for refusing to do so.
The school suspended the teacher last July after receiving complaints and a lengthy disciplinary process was carried out. A statement released on behalf of the school by Cheshire East Council said: 'It can be confirmed that following a long and rigorous disciplinary process, a member of staff at Alsager School has been dismissed from her post. 'The member of staff was suspended in July 2008 following parental complaints and newspaper reports relating to an RE lesson.
'In reaching this decision, the governing body wish to make very clear that they were completely satisfied that at no point did that member of staff make children pray to Allah or put boys in detention for refusing to do so. 'The RE lesson in question contains an element of role play which complies with acceptable practice.'
At the time of the alleged incident, one parent - Sharon Luinen, said: 'This isn't right, it's taking things too far. 'Being asked to pray to Allah, who isn't who they worship, is wrong and what got me is that came away thinking they were being disrespectful.' Another parent, Karen Williams, said: 'I am absolutely furious and I don't find it acceptable. 'I haven't got a problem with them teaching my child other religions and a small amount of information doesn't do any harm. 'But not only did they have to pray, the teacher had gone into the class and asked them watch a short film and then said "we are now going out to pray to Allah".'
The grandfather of one of the pupils in the class added: 'It's absolutely disgusting, there's no other way of putting it.' Parents had claimed that their children were made to bend down on their knees on prayer mats which the teacher had got out of her cupboard.
SOURCE
10,000 penpushers a year are hired by British local councils
And guess who pays for them?
Town halls have hired more than 30,000 extra staff over the past three years, figures revealed yesterday. The workers, mostly penpushers and bureaucrats, were also given higher pay rises than teachers, policemen or firemen.
According to a breakdown of council finances, between 2006 and 2008 the number of teachers employed fell but the number of `other local government staff' increased by 31,000, from 1,084,000 to 1,115,000. They also enjoyed the highest pay rises of any council group, up by 7.6 per cent in 2006, 7.2 per cent in 2007 and 3.3 per cent in 2008, the Department of Communities and Local Government figures showed.
`Other local government' workers include school support staff and others whose jobs directly serve the public. However, town halls also employ highly-paid managers and a growing army of equality officers, outreach workers and sustainability advisers.
Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: `Councils need to get back in touch with what people want and start focusing on delivering better frontline services and cutting back bloated administrations.'
And Tory local government spokesman Caroline Spelman said: `It is very telling that under Gordon Brown the number of teachers being employed is falling while the number of people employed to deal with red tape and bureaucracy is soaring.'
SOURCE
NHS Doctors have cashed in on new bonus scheme but it 'has not helped patient care'
A lucrative bonus scheme for GPs has done nothing to improve patient care, a study claims. Performance-related pay could even be detrimental to the NHS, with GPs chasing targets 'at the cost of the quality of care given to patients'. The bonus scheme was included as part of GPs' 2004 contract, which has seen pay rocket by 55 per cent to almost 108,000.
Ministers introduced the scheme, which accounts for a third of doctors' salaries, with the aim of driving up the quality of care. But a study in the British Medical Journal indicates that in some cases it has made no difference whatsoever - despite costing taxpayers millions.
Researchers at Birmingham University compared the level of diabetes care at 147 surgeries covering one million patients across the country. They found that while there were significant improvements every year in the three years up to the start of the bonus scheme, these improvements then stagnated after it began. It is suggested this could be because GPs stop trying for further improvements once they have achieved the maximum amount of money allocated to diabetes patients.
Under the scheme, known as the Quality and Outcomes Framework, points are awarded for the management of diabetes, including targets for controlling blood pressure, cholesterol and blood glucose levels. There are 1,000 points available annually for each practice, covering a wide range of different illness achievement targets. Each point is worth up to 124 and is then shared between GPs in that practice.
But experts say it is too easy for GPs to gain the maximum number of points and suggest targets need to be more challenging if patients are to see better care. Last year 96.8 per cent of doctors gained the maximum number of points and more than 600 practices achieved 100 per cent.
Dr Melanie Calvert, lecturer at Birmingham University's college of medicine and dentistry, said: 'Our work and that of others highlights the potential unintended consequences of the scheme and raises concerns that it may not have been as efficient in reducing inequalities in health in diabetes as was hoped. 'Although the management of patients with diabetes has improved since the 1990s, the impact of the pay-for-performance initiative on care is not straightforward.' She went on: 'If anything, improvements in care appear to have plateaued since the introduction. 'This may reflect increasing difficulties in target attainments in poorly- controlled patients, but could also suggest that targets for practices need to be more challenging if patients are to benefit.'
Last year a study by the Civitas think-tank found some GPs were putting more effort into treating conditions, including asthma and high blood pressure, that attract points while neglecting dementia and osteoporosis, which do not. Dr Calvert said: 'There is a risk that doctors are focusing on patients they can achieve incentives with and are not focusing on things like osteoporosis which isn't captured in the QOF. 'There is a risk GPs are focusing on tick boxes to meet targets but not focusing on other aspects of care.'
A Department of Health spokesman said: 'Independent research has shown that care for people with diabetes improved more rapidly after the introduction of the QOF. 'We want to see continuous improvements in QOF to support GPs in delivering high quality care for patients.'
SOURCE
British academics want to boycott visa 'snooping'
This is mostly just self-righteous posing that will collapse like a deflated balloon in due course. The Home Office has said that it will remove their accreditation to take overseas students if they do not comply and that would be a big hit to their revenues. Keeping records of attendance at tutorials is already common in some disciplines so extending that to all disciplines should not be onerous
University academics say they will boycott new visa rules for overseas students that would make them into "immigration snoopers". Delegates at the University and College Union's annual conference said they did not want to become a branch of the UK Border Agency.
Under the new rules universities are expected to monitor whether overseas students really attend their courses. The Home Office said such things were part of their normal duty of care. Institutions must also report concerns that a student could be involved in terrorism.
In a debate at the conference, in Bournemouth, delegates argued that the rules would place a strain on the relationship between staff and students from outside the European Union. General secretary Sally Hunt said: "UCU members are educators not border guards." She said later: "Politically, UCU is absolutely opposed to this legislation and we know that many members have strong and principled moral objections as members of society and as professional educators. "One of the more pernicious effects of this new system will be to turn our members into an extra arm of the police force, placing monitoring and reporting responsibilities onto academic and support staff."
One of the resolutions tabled for discussion said the new system "makes educators into immigration snoopers which could damage UK education irreparably". It deplored "this pandering to anti-immigration racism" and committed the union to "non-compliance with all such policing and surveillance duties".
But a Home Office spokesman said: "Educational institutions have a duty of care to all their students and checking that they are attending and making progress in their studies is part of that responsibility. "The records we expect education providers to keep are those which most will keep for their own purposes anyway."
SOURCE
Britain's anti-immigration party: The other side
Mainstream media comments on the BNP are uniformly vituperative and often misleading. In the interests of balance, therefore, I put a case for the defence, written by J. P. Straley
I'm not a Brit, but as an American and an avid internet observer of the British scene, I have been fascinated to watch the rise of what might be an effective nationalist political party in Britain.
The British National Party, under its leader Nick Griffin, has been touting Britain's elections for Members of the European Parliament, to be held on June 4, as its breakthrough. It hopes to capture five MEP seats, with the possibility of a few more if all the cards fall its way. (Which seems to be happening, as the extraordinary U.K. House of Commons expenses scandal in Westminster engulfs ever more British MPs of all parties.)
Commenters in the Brit political blogosphere predict anywhere from zero to five seats, with three as the most common guess. Any seats at all will produce public funding for the party, a very substantial boost, and will raise their visibility in Britain.
It's happened before. Another small party, the United Kingdom Independence Party [UKIP], whose main plank is to take Britain out of the European Union, was very successful in the last MEP election. But UKIP contests few local elections in Britain. For the upcoming June 4 MEP election, polls show it losing ground. Part of this may be the difference in styles. BNP is a bit scruffy and makes a fuss, while UKIP appears to be much more urbane. Unhappy British voters-particularly former Labor voters-appear to like the fuss.
I know I'm not supposed to like the BNP. Because it openly states that ethnicity matters, the British press and TV treat the BNP as if it is toxic waste. The U.S. Mainstream Media follows suit, when it mentions the party at all. The BNP did rise out of the ashes of a more strident National Front Party, and some of its leaders allegedly have or have had radical links (sort of like Obama and Jeremiah Wright, although Griffin has distanced himself much more effectively). All I can say, at a distance of 3000 miles, what the BNP is actually saying and doing now looks rational, reasonable and pretty darn good to me.
Nationalist politics acknowledge the ethnic dimension of nations. Levelers assert there is no difference between peoples, and happily dilute-even replace-the heritage peoples of the West. Nowhere are they more active than in Britain.
I use the term "Heritage Peoples." This is intuitively obvious, but let us see what BNP says about being "British":
"We mean the bonds of culture, race, identity and roots of the native White peoples of the British Isles. We have lived in these islands near on 40,000 years. We were made by these islands, and these islands are our home. When we in the BNP talk about being British, we talk about the native peoples who have lived in these islands since before the Stone Age, and the relatively small numbers of peoples of identical race, such as the Saxons, Vikings and Normans, and the Irish, who have come here and assimilated."[BNP FAQ, 2007]
Indeed, in an April 23 quote, Griffin himself describes the ethnic quality of Britishness in plain language:
"We don't subscribe to the politically correct fiction that just because they happen to be born in Britain, a Pakistani is a Briton. They're not. They remain of Pakistani stock,' he added.
"You can't say that especially large numbers of people can come from the rest of the world and assume an English identity without denying the English their own identity, and I would say that's wrong.
"In a very subtle way, it's a sort of bloodless genocide.'[BNP Updates Language & Concepts Discipline Manual, BNP News, April 27, 2009]
Many whites in Britain appear to be self-haters, and are quite happy to trade Cotswolds country churches for mosques and minarets. So you can imagine the calumny thrown at Griffin over this remark!
Indeed, the "racist" epithet is thrown at BNP every day. BNP replies that it prefers a truly multicultural world where British people are clearly British and peoples from other countries are likewise unmistakable in their provenance. This is not an original policy with BNP, of course-in the second half of the twentieth century colonies of whites throughout the third world were encouraged to pack up and leave.
The BNP's policies strike me as candid and accessible. Here, for instance, is BNP policy on immigration:
"On current demographic trends, we, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years.
"To ensure that this does not happen, and that the British people retain their homeland and identity, we call for an immediate halt to all further immigration, the immediate deportation of criminal and illegal immigrants, and the introduction of a system of voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin assisted by generous financial incentives both for individuals and for the countries in question."[Policies-BNP Website]
Here is a nationalist party that cherishes its Heritage People and states clearly the goal to retain the traditional ethnic balance of their nation. It recognizes the fact of the demographic tsunami-something even sensible observers in the U.S. shrink from doing. The BNP intends to halt the immigrant flood and roll back the replacement of its Heritage Peoples. What's wrong with that?
Clever use of the internet has partially defused the uniformly negative media coverage of BNP. The BNP site offers fresh material daily, and it pulls no punches with its stories. There is certainly interest in the site. According to Alexa internet ratings, the BNP has far, far more traffic than Conservatives, LibDems, or Labor.
The BNP forces are also masters of the You Tube media. A single Y-T inquiry with key word "BNP" yielded forty pages of listings, albeit there were many dissenting views such as the one with the uncivilized title, "BNP Are C_nts". Whichever side of the BNP divide you stand on, if you like your material in movie-form, it's ready for you.
By no means is BNP a wholly electronic communicator. In those area that offer promise, BNP organizers canvas door to door with pamphlets and face-to-face explanations why BNP says, "Britain first!" This year, for the European Parliament election, it has sent out 29 million pieces of mail!
British race-relation quangos and their fellow travelers in government are well-aware of the BNP and Griffin. In December 2004, he was arrested after a covert taping (by a BBC i.e. tax-funded operative) of a speech before a private gathering. BNP and Griffin identify the increasing Muslim population in Britain as one of the chief threats to the country, and in the December 2004 meeting he was captured on tape as suggesting that Islam was a ".wicked and vicious faith." He knew that he was treading the edge of the draconian Race Relations law, and further said he could possibly get seven years prison for such a statement. Government pursued just that course, charging four counts of "incitement to racial hatred." Griffin was eventually acquitted on all counts. Not surprisingly, the BNP proposes to abolish all restrictions on free speech, absent only ".common law restrictions on incitement to violence."
Another grim reminder of official antipathy: BNP membership-that is, membership in a democratic and legal political party-is grounds for local governments to sack police and teachers. In the fall of 2008 the party membership list was leaked, and many such firings occurred.
Is BNP a one-issue anti-immigration party? Widening its scope seems to have been a part of Griffin's leadership. The issues of EU membership (out now, please), trade (mild protectionism), job protection (part of the immigration and guest worker issue), crime (unshackle police, allow persons to resist an intruder without penalty), defense (small, competent forces, avoid foreign wars), energy (develop alternative fuels and energy, promote advanced nuclear power), environment, education, and health are all covered in the manifesto. All told BNP's policy seems to be fairly conventional nationalism, bent on internal improvement and de-emphasizing foreign involvement, with an added tinge of social democracy. Voters certainly have a choice-BNP policies are a rather stark contrast to the Lib-Lab-Con party line.
BNP strategy seems to be to build the party in disaffected regions (London boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, and Burnley northeast of Liverpool are examples), and let success in electing members to local offices (town and city "councilors") increase the appeal of their brand. BNP is eager for councilors to render good service to constituents, though of course some do poorly in the event-an artifact of governing versus merely opposing government) Electing local councilors builds the party machinery and provides experience in actual government for members, as well as building a positive picture to combat negative propaganda.
There are no BNP Members of Britain's Parliament at this time. It takes determination, organization, and grit to make an election-winning party from scratch. But the BNP is making progress:
Total votes in General Elections
1983 14,621
1987 553
1992 7,631
1997 35,832
2001 47,129
2007 192,748
Make no mistake, the BNP remains very much a minority party. The '05 results represent only 0.7% of the total voters, country-wide. But the 2007 Welsh showing was 4.3% of the vote, and in the '08 London Mayoral contest more than 5% of voters went BNP. The party has discrete areas of strength, and these are where it means to win MEP seats.
The stakes are high for Britain. Shall it retain its traditional identity, or become a collection of synthetic citizens, whose opinion is perhaps better polled as mere consumer preference?
It would be interesting to see a country-wide nationalist political party in the US so straightforward in its platform, and so effective in its party-building effort. If BNP are successful on June 4, it will be a lesson to patriots throughout Europe and the US.
Stay tuned, June 4 will be here before you know it!
SOURCE
Britain: "Hitler" image turns out to be Lenin
One hopes that somebody learned something from that:
"A customer complained that the image on the underwear resembled the Nazi leader saluting as planes passed overhead. Next said that it had investigated the complaint and found the image, among a series of cartoons, was inspired by a picture of Lenin, the former Soviet leader.
But a spokesman told The Sun it was withdrawing the remaining 5,200 pairs of the underwear anyway. He said: "The complaint came in today and by the end of the day all 5,200 will be withdrawn. "We have checked with the designer who confirmed the image was inspired by Lenin. Nonetheless, if even one customer is offended or upset we are happy to withdraw the range."
Source
There are pictures of Stalin using the "Fascist" salute too. Scroll down here
Saturday, May 30, 2009
SCOTTISH CLIMATE DELAYERS
ATTEMPTS to toughen carbon emissions targets were rejected by MSPs yesterday. Liberal Democrat MSP Alison McInnes called for Scotland's climate change laws to include a target of 3 per cent annual emissions reductions. This was rejected by members of Holyrood's Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee.
As the climate bill stands, the draft laws will only bring in annual 3 per cent reduction targets from 2020.
Campaign group Stop Climate Chaos Scotland said the lack of early action in the current draft legislation "put at risk" hopes that it would be "world leading".
MSPs also voted against an amendment by Green MSP Robin Harper to increase the 2050 target for emissions reductions from 80 to 90 per cent.
SOURCE
Woman deliberately left in burning car by Muslim boyfriend
In the usual way, the newspaper makes no comment on the origins of Waqas Arshad but you don't have to know much to recognize it as a Pakistani or Indian Muslim name. There are many such people in Britain as a result of the negligible immigration controls in recent years. Waqas Arshad seems to have been quite a piece of work, starting out with drunk driving and driving while uninsured. I am sure Miss Brady's family wish that British immigration had been more selective in the past. I literally cannot imagine an Englishman behaving the way this piece of slime did
Waqas Arshad, 24, crashed into a tree but told emergency services there was nobody inside, despite knowing 17-year-old Emily Brady was trapped in the burning wreckage. Yesterday, Miss Brady's mother Patricia said: 'It was despicable behaviour to make no attempt to try and pull her out of the car.' It was only as firefighters tackled the blaze that they realised the teenager was in the car, still strapped into the passenger seat.
Arshad, of Luton, pleaded guilty yesterday to causing death by careless driving while over the alcohol limit, and causing death by driving while uninsured.
Speaking outside Luton Crown Court today Mrs Brady, 48, said the family were shocked at hearing Arshad had left his girlfriend in the car and made no effort to help her. She said: "Emily lost her precious life on November 2, changing forever the lives of those of us that love her. This was a community tragedy." She said Emily was a full-time student at college, training to be an accountant, and worked on Saturdays at Sainsburys.
'There is a very good reason why drinking and driving is illegal - the consequence is there are many victims,' she added. 'Emily lost her life so horrifically, there are many years of pain ahead. I will never recover from this enormous loss, her terrible absence will be with us until we die.
'However, I am shocked and distressed to learn at this hearing that Waqas Arshad denied she was in the car, made no attempt to rescue her, and in fact lied to the emergency services that she was in the car, trying to conceal her body.'
Natalie Carter, prosecuting at Luton Crown Court, told the court Arshad lost control and crashed into a tree in Eversholt, Bedfordshire, at 3am on November 2 last year. But instead of calling for help, he got out of the car and did nothing. Mrs Carter said: 'After the collision it's plain that Emily Brady was in the passenger seat; the defendant in the driver's seat. 'She did not die as a result of the injuries received in the collision, which included two broken vertebrae, but she died as a result of carbonisation.'
The court - packed with relatives of Miss Brady, who lived in Dunstable - heard how firefighters answering a call from a witness asked Arshad if there was anyone in the car. He told them 'no'. The couple had been together for about six months and had been out drinking together that night. It had been raining and the road surface was wet. Mrs Carter said Arshad had failed to negotiate a right-hand turn on the country lane and crashed into a sycamore tree. The vehicle eventually came to a halt in a field and caught fire. She told the court that both had been wearing seat belts.
Yesterday, Judge John Bevan QC told Arshad a prison sentence was inevitable. He adjourned the case and remanded the defendant in custody until sentencing on June 19. The court also heard that Arshad had been arrested for drink driving while on bail following the incident.
SOURCE
Surgical stockings `don't prevent blood clots in stroke patients', but have nasty side-effects
Another instance of theory-based medicine doing more harm than good
Surgical stockings commonly given to stroke patients to prevent blood clots do not work, a new study suggests. Doctors have found that the compression stockings have no effect in preventing deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) - a life-threatening form of blood clot that can travel up into the heart or lungs - in people who have suffered a stroke. Research carried out by a team from the University of Edinburgh suggests that cutting the use of stockings in stroke units could save the NHS about 7 million and 320,000 hours of nursing time each year. More than 150,000 Britons a year suffer a stroke.
The stockings have been proven to reduce clots in surgery patients, so experts had long thought that the cheap solution might also help stroke patients. About two thirds of stroke patients are unable to walk on admission to hospital and approximately 15 per cent develop blood clots because of this lack of movement.
The Edinburgh team studied more than 2,500 stroke patients in Britain, Italy and Australia. All were treated with routine care, including aspirin and assisted exercise, and half were offered surgical stockings as well. After 30 days, there was no significant difference between the groups in the occurrence of DVT and the patients using stockings suffered more skin breaks, ulcers and blisters than those without. Compression stockings are still recommended for patients who have undergone surgery and for people travelling on long-haul flights.
The results were simultaneously published in The Lancet and presented at the European Stroke Conference in Stockholm on Wednesday. Martin Dennis, Professor of Stroke Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, said: "Until now, the guidelines on the use of these stockings have been based on evidence collected in surgical patients and not in stroke patients. "We have shown conclusively that compression stockings do not work for stroke patients. The national guidelines need to be revised and we need further research to establish effective treatments for these patients. Abandoning this ineffective and sometimes uncomfortable treatment will free up valuable resources in our health services."
Charles Swainson, Medical Director of NHS Lothian, said: "This research underlines the huge importance of close collaboration between the NHS and universities. "Professor Dennis and his colleagues in Lothian and beyond could prove highly important in making sure that nursing time and NHS money are used more effectively for the benefit of patients in Scotland and throughout the world."
Ralph Sacco, president-elect of the American Heart Association, who was not linked to the study, said: "We have used these stockings because we assume they work. But sometimes you're surprised when you find out the truth with a randomised trial."
The CLOTS (Clots in Legs or Stockings after Stroke) trials are funded by the Medical Research Council, Chest, Heart and Stroke Scotland, the Scottish Government Chief Scientist Office and the UK Stroke Research Network. They are also supported by NHS Lothian.
David Clark, chief executive of Chest, Heart & Stroke Scotland, which co-funded the study, said: "This important research shows conclusively that compression stockings do not prevent DVT for stroke patients and can often have unpleasant side effects. More research like this, which will make a practical and positive impact on the lives of stroke patients, is needed."
SOURCE
New cost-cutting NHS guidelines on back pain 'will lead to more surgery'
Thousands of patients could undergo unnecessary spinal operations because of new NHS guidelines on treatments for lower back pain, warn experts. Dozens of hospital consultants say the `cost- cutting' restrictions mean more patients will end up having major surgery. They claim less risky procedures using spinal injections have been wrongly dismissed as ineffective, even though they help hundreds of thousands of patients with chronic back pain each year.
Guidelines issued earlier this week by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) set out permitted treatments for patients whose back pain has lasted for at least six weeks but less than a year. They endorsed widespread use of `alternative' therapy, letting patients opt for a three-month course of acupuncture, manual therapy such as physiotherapy, or exercise.
Described as a `sea-change' for back pain sufferers, the guidelines also told doctors not to recommend therapies with `little evidence' to support them, controversially including injections of small amounts of steroids into the back, MRI scans, X-rays and ultrasound. Now, many patients who fail to respond to initial treatment could miss out this intermediate stage and proceed straight to risky spinal fusion operations.
NICE estimates the NHS will make annual savings of 33million on back injections and 11million on MRI scans. However, it will spend 24million extra on acupuncture and 16million extra on manual therapy, making the cost-cutting aspect negligible.
Around 50 specialists belonging to the Interventional Pain Medicine Group of the British Pain Society are writing to NICE, claiming it has dismissed good evidence about spinal injections, which do not cure pack pain but give a period of relief from chronic pain. Dr Ron Cooper, past chairman of the group and a consultant pain specialist in Northern Ireland, said: `I have never known so many pain medicine specialists to be so furious. More patients will end up having more expensive surgery, which is unnecessary, risky and has worse results.
`NICE made it difficult for us to submit evidence to a committee on which there was not one experienced pain physician. [Very suggestive of a non-medical agenda] `The guidelines will make us the laughing stock of Europe, Australia and the U.S. where pain specialists will continue to have full access to a wide range of treatments.' Dr Raj Munglani, a consultant in pain medicine at West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds, said: `There could be as many as 400,000 patients (a year) who will be eligible for spinal fusion - when it should be a last resort. `There is a lot of concern that this is actually a way of banishing waiting lists for some procedures, because they will no longer be available.' Dr Serge Nikolic, a chronic pain specialist at Bart's hospital in London, said any savings made from the guidelines would be a false economy if they led to more spinal surgery.
A NICE spokesman said: `The guideline sets out... those approaches which either don't work as well as alternatives, or for which there is little evidence of benefit. `The guideline recommends that new research is needed to decide if injections into the back are, or are not, effective.'
SOURCE
The egregious bloodymindedness of bureaucratic Britain
Bureaucrats have contempt for those they have power over. It was only the intervention of a Member of Parliament that squeezed some semblance of decency out of them. In Britain, yellow lines beside the kerb indicate that parking is not permitted there
Ruth Ducker always legally parks her Volkswagen Golf around the corner from her house, so it came as a shock when she discovered it had disappeared from its spot - and in its place was double yellow lines. Her confusion deepened when Lambeth council claimed to have no knowledge of where her car was.
It took three weeks for the council to admit its contractors were behind the disappearance, and then add insult to injury by telling the 44-year-old graphic designer she owed more than 800 in fines. In fact the car had been carefully lifted out of the way for the double yellows to be painted in Gordon Grove in Camberwell, then replaced on the new restrictions by the contractors responsible. The same day a different set of parking enforcers spotted the 'illegally parked' car, and had it towed away - after photographing it on the newly painted double yellows.
Mrs Ducker had left the runabout without its battery, meaning she knew that it had not been stolen. She said: 'My little VW disappeared a week before Christmas. I had parked for years on an unrestricted stretch about 40 yards from my home. When I returned on 19 December to replace the battery my car had disappeared and yellow lines had suddenly appeared. There's no way I could have driven onto those lines. 'Initial inquiries with the council found no trace of the car. It was three weeks before I received my first official notification.'
It took a further two months and the involvement of her local MP Kate Hoey to make the council back down and waive the fines, which by now totalled 2,240. 'What they did was disgraceful,' said Mrs Ducker. "I'm very grateful to my MP. When I saw the photos of my car on the yellow lines I was furious. 'I knew that to pay up would be an admission of guilt, so I decided to fight them. But I didn't get the car back until the middle of February and they offered a paltry 100 to compensate for lost road tax, insurance and inconvenience. Needless to say I still haven't received a penny.'
In a letter to Ms Hoey the council said contractors had told them the 'vehicle may have been lifted in order to facilitate the painting of lines' and admitted residents had not been advised of the planned work. The letter also confirmed that penalty notices were not due to be issued until the day after Mrs Ducker's car was removed. Lambeth council blamed a 'breakdown in communication' between its contractors and has now offered Mrs Ducker 150 compensation.
A council spokesman said: 'This was an unacceptable case and when the council became aware of it we acted to cancel all the charges. We are very sorry for the distress this has caused Mrs Ducker. 'We have raised the case with our contractors in order to avoid something like this happening again in the future. While one case like this is one case too many, this is very much an isolated incident, and all our figures show that in general parking is becoming fairer in Lambeth.'
SOURCE
Teaching to get the best out of a child: is streaming or mixed ability the best way?
How best to teach children is a question which few people agree on - even though parents, teachers and children would benefit from a definitive answer. One issue which does keep cropping up is whether to set children by ability or to teach them all together. This is a topic on which there is strong disagreement.
On Women's Hour last week, Professor Jo Boaler talked about how she is in favour of mixed ability teaching for her subject, maths. She then followed this up, summing up her thoughts in a letter to the Times where she stated: "The highest maths-achieving countries in the world - countries as diverse as Finland and Japan - teach all students to high levels and communicate to all students that they can do well in maths. In England we do the opposite and assign young children to low groups, which we know they never get out of. We then lament the fact that millions of school children leave school unable to use basic mathematics. Teachers may tell you that it is better to divide children into different levels in order to teach them well, but the reality is that it is easier for teachers to divide and label children in such ways."
I spoke to Professor Boaler this morning to confirm whether she believed in mixed ability teaching for all subjects. She said she did, and is passionate on this subject, particularly when it comes to primary aged pupils. Younger children, she says, should never be grouped by ability. It just turns the ones put into lower ability groups, off learning.
It's ironic that the day I heard Professor Boaler speak on Women's Hour was the same one when I met up with Shadow Schools Minister Nick Gibb. He strongly disagrees with mixed ability teaching, suggesting that even in primary schools "there is some benefit in having separate classes for early literacy and potentially for maths." When it comes to secondary school, he thinks that every subject should be streamed. He also believes that this will help all children. "We believe that every academic subject - including history and geography - should be set by ability in comprehensive schools in each year group," he said.
Mr Gibb refers to research, particularly by Kulik, to back up his point. He also says that the key is to tailor the curriculum to the ability level and that when this happens, there are huge increases in educational attainment amongst the more able pupils and no falls in achievement lower down. He even argues that you see a small RISE in self esteem amongst the least able children and a small fall in self esteem amongst the most able children.
"I also believe that the better and more experienced teachers should be asked to teach the least able sets, which should also have smaller class sizes," he says. "In this way, not only are these children given the space and time to learn they will also have very able teachers. Much research on setting highlights the fact that the lower sets often have the weakest teachers. This is an indictment of the schools involved in the research rather than an objective critique of setting."
It's a fascinating argument. Many private schools use setting and streaming, and so did a lot of state schools in the 70s. It then went out of fashion, but has been used more often in recent years. Many parents of brighter pupils are strongly in favour, as they want to see their children "stretched". How best to do this is a moot point.
I think that people's views on setting depend hugely on which set they were in at school. Those in the bottom sets often argue that it made them feel stupid, and inclined to give up on a subject. Research has suggested that those in the lower sets do lose out in terms of self-esteem, while those in the higher sets benefit. Meanwhile those in the top sets often say they felt inspired to carry on achieving, and were pushed by being surrounded by very able peers.
Both these responses are interesting because they suggest that setting might be good for more able children, and not for the less able. However, Nick Gibb argues that all children benefit from being separated according to ability, as long as they are taught well, and as long as the sets are "fluid." Meanwhile Professor Boaler argues that mixed ability teaching benefits all, including the brightest, as long as it is done properly.
"It's not okay to expect all children to do the same work in these mixed ability groups," she adds. "They need to work at different levels, which is hard for the teacher, but means that achievement levels go up massively."
There has, of course, been a great deal of research into this issue. "Complex instruction" which mixes children of all abilities so that they can help each other, has recently been reported to be a success. Professor Boaler is the woman pioneering this in the UK, and found her experiences of it in the US to be a fair and impressive way of teaching. But the subject is still controversial, and as with so many issues, there seems to be research to prove each side....
SOURCE
ATTEMPTS to toughen carbon emissions targets were rejected by MSPs yesterday. Liberal Democrat MSP Alison McInnes called for Scotland's climate change laws to include a target of 3 per cent annual emissions reductions. This was rejected by members of Holyrood's Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee.
As the climate bill stands, the draft laws will only bring in annual 3 per cent reduction targets from 2020.
Campaign group Stop Climate Chaos Scotland said the lack of early action in the current draft legislation "put at risk" hopes that it would be "world leading".
MSPs also voted against an amendment by Green MSP Robin Harper to increase the 2050 target for emissions reductions from 80 to 90 per cent.
SOURCE
Woman deliberately left in burning car by Muslim boyfriend
In the usual way, the newspaper makes no comment on the origins of Waqas Arshad but you don't have to know much to recognize it as a Pakistani or Indian Muslim name. There are many such people in Britain as a result of the negligible immigration controls in recent years. Waqas Arshad seems to have been quite a piece of work, starting out with drunk driving and driving while uninsured. I am sure Miss Brady's family wish that British immigration had been more selective in the past. I literally cannot imagine an Englishman behaving the way this piece of slime did
Waqas Arshad, 24, crashed into a tree but told emergency services there was nobody inside, despite knowing 17-year-old Emily Brady was trapped in the burning wreckage. Yesterday, Miss Brady's mother Patricia said: 'It was despicable behaviour to make no attempt to try and pull her out of the car.' It was only as firefighters tackled the blaze that they realised the teenager was in the car, still strapped into the passenger seat.
Arshad, of Luton, pleaded guilty yesterday to causing death by careless driving while over the alcohol limit, and causing death by driving while uninsured.
Speaking outside Luton Crown Court today Mrs Brady, 48, said the family were shocked at hearing Arshad had left his girlfriend in the car and made no effort to help her. She said: "Emily lost her precious life on November 2, changing forever the lives of those of us that love her. This was a community tragedy." She said Emily was a full-time student at college, training to be an accountant, and worked on Saturdays at Sainsburys.
'There is a very good reason why drinking and driving is illegal - the consequence is there are many victims,' she added. 'Emily lost her life so horrifically, there are many years of pain ahead. I will never recover from this enormous loss, her terrible absence will be with us until we die.
'However, I am shocked and distressed to learn at this hearing that Waqas Arshad denied she was in the car, made no attempt to rescue her, and in fact lied to the emergency services that she was in the car, trying to conceal her body.'
Natalie Carter, prosecuting at Luton Crown Court, told the court Arshad lost control and crashed into a tree in Eversholt, Bedfordshire, at 3am on November 2 last year. But instead of calling for help, he got out of the car and did nothing. Mrs Carter said: 'After the collision it's plain that Emily Brady was in the passenger seat; the defendant in the driver's seat. 'She did not die as a result of the injuries received in the collision, which included two broken vertebrae, but she died as a result of carbonisation.'
The court - packed with relatives of Miss Brady, who lived in Dunstable - heard how firefighters answering a call from a witness asked Arshad if there was anyone in the car. He told them 'no'. The couple had been together for about six months and had been out drinking together that night. It had been raining and the road surface was wet. Mrs Carter said Arshad had failed to negotiate a right-hand turn on the country lane and crashed into a sycamore tree. The vehicle eventually came to a halt in a field and caught fire. She told the court that both had been wearing seat belts.
Yesterday, Judge John Bevan QC told Arshad a prison sentence was inevitable. He adjourned the case and remanded the defendant in custody until sentencing on June 19. The court also heard that Arshad had been arrested for drink driving while on bail following the incident.
SOURCE
Surgical stockings `don't prevent blood clots in stroke patients', but have nasty side-effects
Another instance of theory-based medicine doing more harm than good
Surgical stockings commonly given to stroke patients to prevent blood clots do not work, a new study suggests. Doctors have found that the compression stockings have no effect in preventing deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) - a life-threatening form of blood clot that can travel up into the heart or lungs - in people who have suffered a stroke. Research carried out by a team from the University of Edinburgh suggests that cutting the use of stockings in stroke units could save the NHS about 7 million and 320,000 hours of nursing time each year. More than 150,000 Britons a year suffer a stroke.
The stockings have been proven to reduce clots in surgery patients, so experts had long thought that the cheap solution might also help stroke patients. About two thirds of stroke patients are unable to walk on admission to hospital and approximately 15 per cent develop blood clots because of this lack of movement.
The Edinburgh team studied more than 2,500 stroke patients in Britain, Italy and Australia. All were treated with routine care, including aspirin and assisted exercise, and half were offered surgical stockings as well. After 30 days, there was no significant difference between the groups in the occurrence of DVT and the patients using stockings suffered more skin breaks, ulcers and blisters than those without. Compression stockings are still recommended for patients who have undergone surgery and for people travelling on long-haul flights.
The results were simultaneously published in The Lancet and presented at the European Stroke Conference in Stockholm on Wednesday. Martin Dennis, Professor of Stroke Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, said: "Until now, the guidelines on the use of these stockings have been based on evidence collected in surgical patients and not in stroke patients. "We have shown conclusively that compression stockings do not work for stroke patients. The national guidelines need to be revised and we need further research to establish effective treatments for these patients. Abandoning this ineffective and sometimes uncomfortable treatment will free up valuable resources in our health services."
Charles Swainson, Medical Director of NHS Lothian, said: "This research underlines the huge importance of close collaboration between the NHS and universities. "Professor Dennis and his colleagues in Lothian and beyond could prove highly important in making sure that nursing time and NHS money are used more effectively for the benefit of patients in Scotland and throughout the world."
Ralph Sacco, president-elect of the American Heart Association, who was not linked to the study, said: "We have used these stockings because we assume they work. But sometimes you're surprised when you find out the truth with a randomised trial."
The CLOTS (Clots in Legs or Stockings after Stroke) trials are funded by the Medical Research Council, Chest, Heart and Stroke Scotland, the Scottish Government Chief Scientist Office and the UK Stroke Research Network. They are also supported by NHS Lothian.
David Clark, chief executive of Chest, Heart & Stroke Scotland, which co-funded the study, said: "This important research shows conclusively that compression stockings do not prevent DVT for stroke patients and can often have unpleasant side effects. More research like this, which will make a practical and positive impact on the lives of stroke patients, is needed."
SOURCE
New cost-cutting NHS guidelines on back pain 'will lead to more surgery'
Thousands of patients could undergo unnecessary spinal operations because of new NHS guidelines on treatments for lower back pain, warn experts. Dozens of hospital consultants say the `cost- cutting' restrictions mean more patients will end up having major surgery. They claim less risky procedures using spinal injections have been wrongly dismissed as ineffective, even though they help hundreds of thousands of patients with chronic back pain each year.
Guidelines issued earlier this week by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) set out permitted treatments for patients whose back pain has lasted for at least six weeks but less than a year. They endorsed widespread use of `alternative' therapy, letting patients opt for a three-month course of acupuncture, manual therapy such as physiotherapy, or exercise.
Described as a `sea-change' for back pain sufferers, the guidelines also told doctors not to recommend therapies with `little evidence' to support them, controversially including injections of small amounts of steroids into the back, MRI scans, X-rays and ultrasound. Now, many patients who fail to respond to initial treatment could miss out this intermediate stage and proceed straight to risky spinal fusion operations.
NICE estimates the NHS will make annual savings of 33million on back injections and 11million on MRI scans. However, it will spend 24million extra on acupuncture and 16million extra on manual therapy, making the cost-cutting aspect negligible.
Around 50 specialists belonging to the Interventional Pain Medicine Group of the British Pain Society are writing to NICE, claiming it has dismissed good evidence about spinal injections, which do not cure pack pain but give a period of relief from chronic pain. Dr Ron Cooper, past chairman of the group and a consultant pain specialist in Northern Ireland, said: `I have never known so many pain medicine specialists to be so furious. More patients will end up having more expensive surgery, which is unnecessary, risky and has worse results.
`NICE made it difficult for us to submit evidence to a committee on which there was not one experienced pain physician. [Very suggestive of a non-medical agenda] `The guidelines will make us the laughing stock of Europe, Australia and the U.S. where pain specialists will continue to have full access to a wide range of treatments.' Dr Raj Munglani, a consultant in pain medicine at West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds, said: `There could be as many as 400,000 patients (a year) who will be eligible for spinal fusion - when it should be a last resort. `There is a lot of concern that this is actually a way of banishing waiting lists for some procedures, because they will no longer be available.' Dr Serge Nikolic, a chronic pain specialist at Bart's hospital in London, said any savings made from the guidelines would be a false economy if they led to more spinal surgery.
A NICE spokesman said: `The guideline sets out... those approaches which either don't work as well as alternatives, or for which there is little evidence of benefit. `The guideline recommends that new research is needed to decide if injections into the back are, or are not, effective.'
SOURCE
The egregious bloodymindedness of bureaucratic Britain
Bureaucrats have contempt for those they have power over. It was only the intervention of a Member of Parliament that squeezed some semblance of decency out of them. In Britain, yellow lines beside the kerb indicate that parking is not permitted there
Ruth Ducker always legally parks her Volkswagen Golf around the corner from her house, so it came as a shock when she discovered it had disappeared from its spot - and in its place was double yellow lines. Her confusion deepened when Lambeth council claimed to have no knowledge of where her car was.
It took three weeks for the council to admit its contractors were behind the disappearance, and then add insult to injury by telling the 44-year-old graphic designer she owed more than 800 in fines. In fact the car had been carefully lifted out of the way for the double yellows to be painted in Gordon Grove in Camberwell, then replaced on the new restrictions by the contractors responsible. The same day a different set of parking enforcers spotted the 'illegally parked' car, and had it towed away - after photographing it on the newly painted double yellows.
Mrs Ducker had left the runabout without its battery, meaning she knew that it had not been stolen. She said: 'My little VW disappeared a week before Christmas. I had parked for years on an unrestricted stretch about 40 yards from my home. When I returned on 19 December to replace the battery my car had disappeared and yellow lines had suddenly appeared. There's no way I could have driven onto those lines. 'Initial inquiries with the council found no trace of the car. It was three weeks before I received my first official notification.'
It took a further two months and the involvement of her local MP Kate Hoey to make the council back down and waive the fines, which by now totalled 2,240. 'What they did was disgraceful,' said Mrs Ducker. "I'm very grateful to my MP. When I saw the photos of my car on the yellow lines I was furious. 'I knew that to pay up would be an admission of guilt, so I decided to fight them. But I didn't get the car back until the middle of February and they offered a paltry 100 to compensate for lost road tax, insurance and inconvenience. Needless to say I still haven't received a penny.'
In a letter to Ms Hoey the council said contractors had told them the 'vehicle may have been lifted in order to facilitate the painting of lines' and admitted residents had not been advised of the planned work. The letter also confirmed that penalty notices were not due to be issued until the day after Mrs Ducker's car was removed. Lambeth council blamed a 'breakdown in communication' between its contractors and has now offered Mrs Ducker 150 compensation.
A council spokesman said: 'This was an unacceptable case and when the council became aware of it we acted to cancel all the charges. We are very sorry for the distress this has caused Mrs Ducker. 'We have raised the case with our contractors in order to avoid something like this happening again in the future. While one case like this is one case too many, this is very much an isolated incident, and all our figures show that in general parking is becoming fairer in Lambeth.'
SOURCE
Teaching to get the best out of a child: is streaming or mixed ability the best way?
How best to teach children is a question which few people agree on - even though parents, teachers and children would benefit from a definitive answer. One issue which does keep cropping up is whether to set children by ability or to teach them all together. This is a topic on which there is strong disagreement.
On Women's Hour last week, Professor Jo Boaler talked about how she is in favour of mixed ability teaching for her subject, maths. She then followed this up, summing up her thoughts in a letter to the Times where she stated: "The highest maths-achieving countries in the world - countries as diverse as Finland and Japan - teach all students to high levels and communicate to all students that they can do well in maths. In England we do the opposite and assign young children to low groups, which we know they never get out of. We then lament the fact that millions of school children leave school unable to use basic mathematics. Teachers may tell you that it is better to divide children into different levels in order to teach them well, but the reality is that it is easier for teachers to divide and label children in such ways."
I spoke to Professor Boaler this morning to confirm whether she believed in mixed ability teaching for all subjects. She said she did, and is passionate on this subject, particularly when it comes to primary aged pupils. Younger children, she says, should never be grouped by ability. It just turns the ones put into lower ability groups, off learning.
It's ironic that the day I heard Professor Boaler speak on Women's Hour was the same one when I met up with Shadow Schools Minister Nick Gibb. He strongly disagrees with mixed ability teaching, suggesting that even in primary schools "there is some benefit in having separate classes for early literacy and potentially for maths." When it comes to secondary school, he thinks that every subject should be streamed. He also believes that this will help all children. "We believe that every academic subject - including history and geography - should be set by ability in comprehensive schools in each year group," he said.
Mr Gibb refers to research, particularly by Kulik, to back up his point. He also says that the key is to tailor the curriculum to the ability level and that when this happens, there are huge increases in educational attainment amongst the more able pupils and no falls in achievement lower down. He even argues that you see a small RISE in self esteem amongst the least able children and a small fall in self esteem amongst the most able children.
"I also believe that the better and more experienced teachers should be asked to teach the least able sets, which should also have smaller class sizes," he says. "In this way, not only are these children given the space and time to learn they will also have very able teachers. Much research on setting highlights the fact that the lower sets often have the weakest teachers. This is an indictment of the schools involved in the research rather than an objective critique of setting."
It's a fascinating argument. Many private schools use setting and streaming, and so did a lot of state schools in the 70s. It then went out of fashion, but has been used more often in recent years. Many parents of brighter pupils are strongly in favour, as they want to see their children "stretched". How best to do this is a moot point.
I think that people's views on setting depend hugely on which set they were in at school. Those in the bottom sets often argue that it made them feel stupid, and inclined to give up on a subject. Research has suggested that those in the lower sets do lose out in terms of self-esteem, while those in the higher sets benefit. Meanwhile those in the top sets often say they felt inspired to carry on achieving, and were pushed by being surrounded by very able peers.
Both these responses are interesting because they suggest that setting might be good for more able children, and not for the less able. However, Nick Gibb argues that all children benefit from being separated according to ability, as long as they are taught well, and as long as the sets are "fluid." Meanwhile Professor Boaler argues that mixed ability teaching benefits all, including the brightest, as long as it is done properly.
"It's not okay to expect all children to do the same work in these mixed ability groups," she adds. "They need to work at different levels, which is hard for the teacher, but means that achievement levels go up massively."
There has, of course, been a great deal of research into this issue. "Complex instruction" which mixes children of all abilities so that they can help each other, has recently been reported to be a success. Professor Boaler is the woman pioneering this in the UK, and found her experiences of it in the US to be a fair and impressive way of teaching. But the subject is still controversial, and as with so many issues, there seems to be research to prove each side....
SOURCE
Friday, May 29, 2009
Green homeowner hit with noise abatement order because 40ft wind turbine is driving his neighbours mad
When Stephen Munday spent 20,000 on a wind turbine to generate electricity for his home, he was proud to be doing his bit for the environment. He got planning permission and put up the 40ft device two years ago, making sure he stuck to strict noise level limits. But neighbours still complained that the sound was annoying - and now the local council has ordered him to switch it off.
Officials declared that the sound - which Mr Munday says is 'the same pitch as a dishwasher and quieter than birdsong' - constituted a nuisance, and issued a Noise Abatement Order. This is despite the turbine being more than 164ft from the nearest neighbour's house, as ordered by the planners. The ruling could have serious implications for the Government's drive to promote wind power and the use of renewable domestic energy if repeated across the country.
Electrician Mr Munday, 55, and his wife Sandra, a veterinary nurse, challenged the decision by the Vale of White Horse district council in Oxfordshire. But Didcot magistrates rejected their appeal and they were left to pick up the 5,392 court costs as well.
The turbine generated five kilowatts of electricity a day - the equivalent of boiling 300 kettles - and provided two-thirds of the family's energy needs. It also saved them an average of 500 a year in electricity costs.
Mr Munday, of Stanford in the Vale, near Abindgon, said: 'I am very disappointed. 'We were trying to cut down on our electricity bills and help the environment but have been clobbered for doing so. 'Everyone is encouraged to be environmentally friendly and we wanted to do our bit. We never dreamed that going green would land us in court and 25,000 out of pocket.'
The Government planning inspector granted planning permission on the condition that the turbine did not make more than five decibels of noise above that of the 'prevailing background'. It stands in a paddock 230ft from the Mundays' four-bedroomed detached house. But five neighbours complained about the noise after the turbine began generating power in February 2007.
Patrick Legge, team leader of the council's environmental protection team, said: 'We accept that the noise did not breach the conditions in the planning application but it was decided that the character of the noise was a nuisance. 'There are no strict overall noise limits but each case is examined by their independent circumstances.'
Michael Stigwood, an independent noise and nuisance adviser to the council, told the court that the noise affected people's ability to 'rest and relax'. 'The noise was continual,' he said. 'It's irritating and gets under your skin and is intrusive.'
Neighbour Virginia Thomasson, 49, said: 'I can hear it inside and outside my house - at night, in the daytime, all the time. 'I cannot sleep with the window open. 'I am a tolerant person but with this noise it superimposes itself over everything I hear.' Another resident, Michael Brown, 49, added: 'The rhythmic mechanical noise is very irritating and incessant.'
Chairman of the bench Liz Holford told the Mundays, who represented themselves in court, that the council's order was 'reasonable and necessary'. Now their only option is to appeal to the High Court - but they cannot afford to do so.
According to the BWEA, the wind industry trade body, more than 10,000 small wind turbines have been set up since 2005 and an estimated 600,000 could be installed by 2020.
SOURCE
British school exclusions 'merry-go-round' shows that reforms are failing
Children are being thrown out of school repeatedly in a merry-go-round of exclusions, according to an investigation by The Times that shows that government reforms are not working. Ministers put pressure on schools to reduce the number of permanent expulsions and this figure has fallen by almost a half in the past decade.
However, schools are resorting increasingly to multiple short-term exclusions - frequently removing the same disruptive pupils, who may then be left alone at home or wandering the streets. An estimated 176,000 children were suspended more than once last year, according to a survey of local authorities by The Times. Thousands more were expelled.
Despite claims from ministers that they are doing more to help excluded children, schools and councils are struggling to comply with a new law that means they must provide full-time alternative education on the sixth day of exclusion, rather than the 16th day as required previously. Lack of funding and resources means that some pupil referral units are overwhelmed and can offer only a few hours a week to teenagers. At some units pupils turn up for only a couple of hours, once a week.
Two children in Macclesfield were given four hours' schoolwork a week to complete at home. A five-year-old in South London was excluded and left without education for six weeks and then went back to the unit for three half-days a week.
New figures show an alarming link between exclusion and prison, and education experts say that expulsion very often leads to a criminal lifestyle. Two fifths of adult male prisoners had been excluded from school, according to figures published recently by the Prison Reform Trust. A Home Office report, released last month, showed that 86 per cent of under-18 male inmates in young offender institutions had been expelled from school. Carl Parsons, a professor of education and an author of books on exclusion, said: "These kids are very often in or on the edge of the criminal justice system before they are excluded. Exclusion will push them further."
The extent of the problems faced by schools is revealed in our survey of local authorities, which found that many children were excluded for aggressive and even violent behaviour, as well as for being disruptive.
In Durham half of expelled children had assaulted or threatened a teacher or another pupil. Others were removed for theft, sexual misconduct, bullying, damage to property or incidents linked to drugs and alcohol. One local authority said: "Some emerging issues around exclusion include guns, gang issues, weapons and drugs."
Teachers who have campaigned for greater protection say that such children should be removed from the classroom. John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said: "People talk about the effect of exclusion on a child, but what they forget is the effect of that child on other children. They are the group of people who get more fed up than anyone with bad behaviour, and end up disrupted and demoralised."
Nearly 15,000 children were excluded more than five times in 2006-07, according to government figures. The Times survey shows that more than a third of pupils excluded last year were removed from school more than once - a total of 7,023 children in 15 rural, urban and suburban local authorities. When extrapolated across all 375 authorities in England and Wales it equates to almost 176,000 children. In some areas 60 per cent of excluded children went through the experience repeatedly.
This use of numerous fixed-period exclusions reduces the number of permanent exclusions, giving the impression that the problem of disruptive behaviour is being tackled. Steve Turner, a director of UK Youth, which develops alternative provision, said: "There are pupils who go round and round the system. They get stuck in a cycle of attending and being excluded."
The schools inspectorate Ofsted found recently that only half of the local authorities it surveyed were meeting the target of alternative provision for excluded pupils. It painted a picture of variable funding, poor communication and a lack of capacity in pupil referral units.
This was echoed by respondents to The Times survey. Derbyshire failed to place 11 pupils in alternative provision within six days, and Luton was unable to meet the deadline for two. A Luton Council spokesman said: "Sixth-day provision is an unrealistic expectation since appropriate provision needs to be selected with care." Sunderland Council said: "An area of challenge continues to be finding a range of quality, appropriate, alternative provision for pupils for whom mainstream education is not appropriate."
Martin Narey, the head of Barnardo's and former director-general of the Prison Service, once said that on the day a child is excluded they might as well be given a date for prison. He told The Times: "I'd be astonished if this had changed significantly. We inevitably find that if you take someone out of a class of 30 children, they can prosper and do very well in a smaller class and have a good chance in life. Once a child has been excluded permanently, or repeatedly for a fixed term, it's very difficult to arrest that."
The Government says that the fall in permanent expulsions and increase in temporary exclusions is a success because it reflects "early intervention and a reduction in the most serious incidents of bad behaviour".
Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, admitted last year that a significant minority of referral units were not performing to the required standard and ordered them to improve or close. His department has set up a dozen pilots of alternative provision, including a city farm equestrian centre, a football training school and an arts centre.
Jim Knight, the schools minister, said yesterday: "Fixed-term exclusions and suspensions are an important tool for heads to use in tackling disruptive behaviour and safeguarding the learning of other children. At the same time, repeatedly suspending pupils doesn't solve the problem. Excluded pupils need a good education and we expect local authorities to meet their legal obligations and ensure that every child is getting a suitable education."
SOURCE
VIDEOS OF ANTI-JIHAD PROTEST IN LUTON --IS THIS THE UK'S NEW "SHOT AT THE CONCORD BRIDGE"?
Funny how every single Euro-Muslim demonstration quickly blossoms into an orgy of arson, assault, theft and general mayhem, after which the media does its best to minimize the chaos caused by the "Asian youths"...But a rather low key affair with one (1) broken window is described as follows by the supposedly respectable Daily Mail:
Nine arrested after masked mob's march against Muslim extremists turns violent
By CLAIRE ELLICOTT Last updated at 4:29 PM on 25th May 2009
Nine people have been arrested after hundreds of anti-Islamist protesters clashed with police yesterday. The streets of Luton descended into violence after demonstrators, many hiding their faces behind balaclavas, brandished England flags and chanted at officers. A group called March for England was said to have organised the rally as a peaceful protest against Muslim extremists. They were joined by a local group United People of Luton.
Two of those arrested have been charged: one man for possessing an offensive weapon after stones were found in his pockets, and a woman was charged with breaching an anti-social behaviour order. Another man was fined £80 for a public order offence. [compare these offenses with the mass destruction that routinely attends Euro-Muslim demonstrations--J.O.]
The other six people, all men, have been bailed without charge pending further inquiries. [IOW, 9 arrests, 3 petty charges for the whole "mob"--J.O.]
During the protest, the mob, which included teenagers and women, held banners with slogans such as 'No Sharia Law in the UK' and 'Respect our Troops'. [PRETTY SCARY!!]
After looking at the 2 new vids, what do you think? I doubt as much as 1% of the crowd has "masks," but that's what the Mail focused on. Hmmmmmmmmmm
SOURCE
New drug delays prostate cancer slightly
One has to laugh at the original headline on this story: "Life-saving wonder drug to fight prostate cancer 'available in just two years'"
A new drug that has dramatic effects against prostate cancer could be available in just two years, scientists said last night. Successful trials have shown that it can shrink the most dangerous tumours in up to 70 per cent of cases. The drug, abiraterone, has been hailed as the biggest advance in the field for 60 years, capable of saving many thousands of lives. The British scientists behind it will start trials soon to see if it can also work against breast cancer.
Prostate is Britain's most common cancer among men and the second highest killer, after lung cancer. Some 35,000 people a year are diagnosed with it - and 12,000 die. [I am betting that all of them die. 23,000 immortals is hard to believe]
There are two types, aggressive and non-aggressive. Two-thirds of cases have the non-aggressive variety and can often lead a healthy life. But those with the aggressive version - 10,000 British men a year - usually die within 18 months of diagnosis.
Abiraterone was discovered by the Institute of Cancer Research with funding from Cancer Research UK. The latest trials on men with aggressive cancer found that just four pills a day can control the disease and reduce pain - all with few side effects. The effect does not last indefinitely - tumour growth can resume after an average of eight months. But the scientists have developed a method of prolonging the benefits for another 12 months by combining the drug with a steroid.
They also discovered that men with a particular gene abnormality - thought to drive the growth of the cancer - responded best to abiraterone. The team have developed a test for the abnormality to identify the men likely to derive the most benefit from the drug.
Lead researcher Dr Gert Attard said of the latest trial, involving 54 patients: 'These men have very aggressive prostate cancer which is exceptionally difficult to treat and almost always proves to be fatal. 'We hope that abiraterone will eventually offer them real hope of an effective way of managing their condition and prolonging their lives.'
Hormone therapy, the standard method of treating prostate cancer, involves blocking the body's production of male hormones like testosterone, which 'feed' the tumour. But it can be ineffective on aggressive forms, where the tumours produce their own hormones. Doctors can try chemotherapy, but it may have severe side effects such as nausea, pain, malnutrition, haemorrhages and hair loss. Many patients also have radiotherapy to reduce associated pain in the bones. This can also be dangerous, leaving patients with little quality of life.
Abiraterone uses a different approach, blocking chemicals in the body which help in the production of male hormones, including by tumours. Chief investigator Dr Johann de Bono said: 'This has changed the way the science community looks at prostate cancer.'
The drug is now undergoing a much larger final-stage trial in 150 hospitals worldwide. If it is successful, the scientists, who published their findings in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, hope the drug will be licensed as early as 2011. The rationing body Nice would then decide if it should be available on the NHS. Professor Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research, said: 'These early results hold great promise and give real hope for the future. 'We are keen to see the results of larger trials now under way, to find out whether abiraterone should be made generally available.'
SOURCE
England absorbs virtually all net migration to UK, MPs warn
Between 1991 and 2007, more than 2.1 million migrants were added to the population of England, which last year became the most crowded major country in Europe. The nation has taken more than 20 times more migrants than Scotland, even though it is only ten times the size in terms of population.
The study, by the Cross Party Group on Balance Migration, warns the population of England is likely to increase by a further ten million over the next two decades, of which seven million will be migrants. Nicholas Soames, Tory MP and co-chairman of the group, said: "The political establishment is in denial on immigration - even though it is of concern to nearly 80 per cent of the population. If they are to reconnect with the people of England after the current political crisis, politicians must end their timidity, silence and inaction on this critical issue."
Net international migration to England between 1991 and 2007 was 2,149,000, which accounted for 92 per cent of the total over that period. Scotland's migrant population increased by 105,000 over the period, Wales by 56,000 and Northern Ireland by 27,000. England effectively absorbed 11 times more migrants than the other three home nations combined, even though it is only five times as large in terms of total population.
Frank Field, Labour MP and co-chairman of the group, added: "This research shows that immigration is overwhelmingly an issue for England rather than other parts of the UK. England can expect a population increase of nearly 10 million people in the next 20 years or so, of which 7 million will be thanks to new immigration."
The Daily Telegraph told last year how England's population is growing at the fastest rate since records began and is now the most crowded major country in Europe after overtaking Holland. Figures showed that the population density is higher than ever before, with forecasts predicting 157 people for every square mile by 2011. This compares with 111 for every square mile when the figures started to be collected in 1931.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the think-tank Migrationwatch, said: "This paper really underlines that immigration is a problem for England, not the UK. "Those who favour continued immigration need to explain why we want an extra seven million people in what is already the most crowded country in Europe. "They also need to explain how we are going to pay for all the extra infrastructure when the public finances are already hugely in deficit."
SOURCE
When Stephen Munday spent 20,000 on a wind turbine to generate electricity for his home, he was proud to be doing his bit for the environment. He got planning permission and put up the 40ft device two years ago, making sure he stuck to strict noise level limits. But neighbours still complained that the sound was annoying - and now the local council has ordered him to switch it off.
Officials declared that the sound - which Mr Munday says is 'the same pitch as a dishwasher and quieter than birdsong' - constituted a nuisance, and issued a Noise Abatement Order. This is despite the turbine being more than 164ft from the nearest neighbour's house, as ordered by the planners. The ruling could have serious implications for the Government's drive to promote wind power and the use of renewable domestic energy if repeated across the country.
Electrician Mr Munday, 55, and his wife Sandra, a veterinary nurse, challenged the decision by the Vale of White Horse district council in Oxfordshire. But Didcot magistrates rejected their appeal and they were left to pick up the 5,392 court costs as well.
The turbine generated five kilowatts of electricity a day - the equivalent of boiling 300 kettles - and provided two-thirds of the family's energy needs. It also saved them an average of 500 a year in electricity costs.
Mr Munday, of Stanford in the Vale, near Abindgon, said: 'I am very disappointed. 'We were trying to cut down on our electricity bills and help the environment but have been clobbered for doing so. 'Everyone is encouraged to be environmentally friendly and we wanted to do our bit. We never dreamed that going green would land us in court and 25,000 out of pocket.'
The Government planning inspector granted planning permission on the condition that the turbine did not make more than five decibels of noise above that of the 'prevailing background'. It stands in a paddock 230ft from the Mundays' four-bedroomed detached house. But five neighbours complained about the noise after the turbine began generating power in February 2007.
Patrick Legge, team leader of the council's environmental protection team, said: 'We accept that the noise did not breach the conditions in the planning application but it was decided that the character of the noise was a nuisance. 'There are no strict overall noise limits but each case is examined by their independent circumstances.'
Michael Stigwood, an independent noise and nuisance adviser to the council, told the court that the noise affected people's ability to 'rest and relax'. 'The noise was continual,' he said. 'It's irritating and gets under your skin and is intrusive.'
Neighbour Virginia Thomasson, 49, said: 'I can hear it inside and outside my house - at night, in the daytime, all the time. 'I cannot sleep with the window open. 'I am a tolerant person but with this noise it superimposes itself over everything I hear.' Another resident, Michael Brown, 49, added: 'The rhythmic mechanical noise is very irritating and incessant.'
Chairman of the bench Liz Holford told the Mundays, who represented themselves in court, that the council's order was 'reasonable and necessary'. Now their only option is to appeal to the High Court - but they cannot afford to do so.
According to the BWEA, the wind industry trade body, more than 10,000 small wind turbines have been set up since 2005 and an estimated 600,000 could be installed by 2020.
SOURCE
British school exclusions 'merry-go-round' shows that reforms are failing
Children are being thrown out of school repeatedly in a merry-go-round of exclusions, according to an investigation by The Times that shows that government reforms are not working. Ministers put pressure on schools to reduce the number of permanent expulsions and this figure has fallen by almost a half in the past decade.
However, schools are resorting increasingly to multiple short-term exclusions - frequently removing the same disruptive pupils, who may then be left alone at home or wandering the streets. An estimated 176,000 children were suspended more than once last year, according to a survey of local authorities by The Times. Thousands more were expelled.
Despite claims from ministers that they are doing more to help excluded children, schools and councils are struggling to comply with a new law that means they must provide full-time alternative education on the sixth day of exclusion, rather than the 16th day as required previously. Lack of funding and resources means that some pupil referral units are overwhelmed and can offer only a few hours a week to teenagers. At some units pupils turn up for only a couple of hours, once a week.
Two children in Macclesfield were given four hours' schoolwork a week to complete at home. A five-year-old in South London was excluded and left without education for six weeks and then went back to the unit for three half-days a week.
New figures show an alarming link between exclusion and prison, and education experts say that expulsion very often leads to a criminal lifestyle. Two fifths of adult male prisoners had been excluded from school, according to figures published recently by the Prison Reform Trust. A Home Office report, released last month, showed that 86 per cent of under-18 male inmates in young offender institutions had been expelled from school. Carl Parsons, a professor of education and an author of books on exclusion, said: "These kids are very often in or on the edge of the criminal justice system before they are excluded. Exclusion will push them further."
The extent of the problems faced by schools is revealed in our survey of local authorities, which found that many children were excluded for aggressive and even violent behaviour, as well as for being disruptive.
In Durham half of expelled children had assaulted or threatened a teacher or another pupil. Others were removed for theft, sexual misconduct, bullying, damage to property or incidents linked to drugs and alcohol. One local authority said: "Some emerging issues around exclusion include guns, gang issues, weapons and drugs."
Teachers who have campaigned for greater protection say that such children should be removed from the classroom. John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said: "People talk about the effect of exclusion on a child, but what they forget is the effect of that child on other children. They are the group of people who get more fed up than anyone with bad behaviour, and end up disrupted and demoralised."
Nearly 15,000 children were excluded more than five times in 2006-07, according to government figures. The Times survey shows that more than a third of pupils excluded last year were removed from school more than once - a total of 7,023 children in 15 rural, urban and suburban local authorities. When extrapolated across all 375 authorities in England and Wales it equates to almost 176,000 children. In some areas 60 per cent of excluded children went through the experience repeatedly.
This use of numerous fixed-period exclusions reduces the number of permanent exclusions, giving the impression that the problem of disruptive behaviour is being tackled. Steve Turner, a director of UK Youth, which develops alternative provision, said: "There are pupils who go round and round the system. They get stuck in a cycle of attending and being excluded."
The schools inspectorate Ofsted found recently that only half of the local authorities it surveyed were meeting the target of alternative provision for excluded pupils. It painted a picture of variable funding, poor communication and a lack of capacity in pupil referral units.
This was echoed by respondents to The Times survey. Derbyshire failed to place 11 pupils in alternative provision within six days, and Luton was unable to meet the deadline for two. A Luton Council spokesman said: "Sixth-day provision is an unrealistic expectation since appropriate provision needs to be selected with care." Sunderland Council said: "An area of challenge continues to be finding a range of quality, appropriate, alternative provision for pupils for whom mainstream education is not appropriate."
Martin Narey, the head of Barnardo's and former director-general of the Prison Service, once said that on the day a child is excluded they might as well be given a date for prison. He told The Times: "I'd be astonished if this had changed significantly. We inevitably find that if you take someone out of a class of 30 children, they can prosper and do very well in a smaller class and have a good chance in life. Once a child has been excluded permanently, or repeatedly for a fixed term, it's very difficult to arrest that."
The Government says that the fall in permanent expulsions and increase in temporary exclusions is a success because it reflects "early intervention and a reduction in the most serious incidents of bad behaviour".
Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, admitted last year that a significant minority of referral units were not performing to the required standard and ordered them to improve or close. His department has set up a dozen pilots of alternative provision, including a city farm equestrian centre, a football training school and an arts centre.
Jim Knight, the schools minister, said yesterday: "Fixed-term exclusions and suspensions are an important tool for heads to use in tackling disruptive behaviour and safeguarding the learning of other children. At the same time, repeatedly suspending pupils doesn't solve the problem. Excluded pupils need a good education and we expect local authorities to meet their legal obligations and ensure that every child is getting a suitable education."
SOURCE
VIDEOS OF ANTI-JIHAD PROTEST IN LUTON --IS THIS THE UK'S NEW "SHOT AT THE CONCORD BRIDGE"?
Funny how every single Euro-Muslim demonstration quickly blossoms into an orgy of arson, assault, theft and general mayhem, after which the media does its best to minimize the chaos caused by the "Asian youths"...But a rather low key affair with one (1) broken window is described as follows by the supposedly respectable Daily Mail:
Nine arrested after masked mob's march against Muslim extremists turns violent
By CLAIRE ELLICOTT Last updated at 4:29 PM on 25th May 2009
Nine people have been arrested after hundreds of anti-Islamist protesters clashed with police yesterday. The streets of Luton descended into violence after demonstrators, many hiding their faces behind balaclavas, brandished England flags and chanted at officers. A group called March for England was said to have organised the rally as a peaceful protest against Muslim extremists. They were joined by a local group United People of Luton.
Two of those arrested have been charged: one man for possessing an offensive weapon after stones were found in his pockets, and a woman was charged with breaching an anti-social behaviour order. Another man was fined £80 for a public order offence. [compare these offenses with the mass destruction that routinely attends Euro-Muslim demonstrations--J.O.]
The other six people, all men, have been bailed without charge pending further inquiries. [IOW, 9 arrests, 3 petty charges for the whole "mob"--J.O.]
During the protest, the mob, which included teenagers and women, held banners with slogans such as 'No Sharia Law in the UK' and 'Respect our Troops'. [PRETTY SCARY!!]
After looking at the 2 new vids, what do you think? I doubt as much as 1% of the crowd has "masks," but that's what the Mail focused on. Hmmmmmmmmmm
SOURCE
New drug delays prostate cancer slightly
One has to laugh at the original headline on this story: "Life-saving wonder drug to fight prostate cancer 'available in just two years'"
A new drug that has dramatic effects against prostate cancer could be available in just two years, scientists said last night. Successful trials have shown that it can shrink the most dangerous tumours in up to 70 per cent of cases. The drug, abiraterone, has been hailed as the biggest advance in the field for 60 years, capable of saving many thousands of lives. The British scientists behind it will start trials soon to see if it can also work against breast cancer.
Prostate is Britain's most common cancer among men and the second highest killer, after lung cancer. Some 35,000 people a year are diagnosed with it - and 12,000 die. [I am betting that all of them die. 23,000 immortals is hard to believe]
There are two types, aggressive and non-aggressive. Two-thirds of cases have the non-aggressive variety and can often lead a healthy life. But those with the aggressive version - 10,000 British men a year - usually die within 18 months of diagnosis.
Abiraterone was discovered by the Institute of Cancer Research with funding from Cancer Research UK. The latest trials on men with aggressive cancer found that just four pills a day can control the disease and reduce pain - all with few side effects. The effect does not last indefinitely - tumour growth can resume after an average of eight months. But the scientists have developed a method of prolonging the benefits for another 12 months by combining the drug with a steroid.
They also discovered that men with a particular gene abnormality - thought to drive the growth of the cancer - responded best to abiraterone. The team have developed a test for the abnormality to identify the men likely to derive the most benefit from the drug.
Lead researcher Dr Gert Attard said of the latest trial, involving 54 patients: 'These men have very aggressive prostate cancer which is exceptionally difficult to treat and almost always proves to be fatal. 'We hope that abiraterone will eventually offer them real hope of an effective way of managing their condition and prolonging their lives.'
Hormone therapy, the standard method of treating prostate cancer, involves blocking the body's production of male hormones like testosterone, which 'feed' the tumour. But it can be ineffective on aggressive forms, where the tumours produce their own hormones. Doctors can try chemotherapy, but it may have severe side effects such as nausea, pain, malnutrition, haemorrhages and hair loss. Many patients also have radiotherapy to reduce associated pain in the bones. This can also be dangerous, leaving patients with little quality of life.
Abiraterone uses a different approach, blocking chemicals in the body which help in the production of male hormones, including by tumours. Chief investigator Dr Johann de Bono said: 'This has changed the way the science community looks at prostate cancer.'
The drug is now undergoing a much larger final-stage trial in 150 hospitals worldwide. If it is successful, the scientists, who published their findings in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, hope the drug will be licensed as early as 2011. The rationing body Nice would then decide if it should be available on the NHS. Professor Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research, said: 'These early results hold great promise and give real hope for the future. 'We are keen to see the results of larger trials now under way, to find out whether abiraterone should be made generally available.'
SOURCE
England absorbs virtually all net migration to UK, MPs warn
Between 1991 and 2007, more than 2.1 million migrants were added to the population of England, which last year became the most crowded major country in Europe. The nation has taken more than 20 times more migrants than Scotland, even though it is only ten times the size in terms of population.
The study, by the Cross Party Group on Balance Migration, warns the population of England is likely to increase by a further ten million over the next two decades, of which seven million will be migrants. Nicholas Soames, Tory MP and co-chairman of the group, said: "The political establishment is in denial on immigration - even though it is of concern to nearly 80 per cent of the population. If they are to reconnect with the people of England after the current political crisis, politicians must end their timidity, silence and inaction on this critical issue."
Net international migration to England between 1991 and 2007 was 2,149,000, which accounted for 92 per cent of the total over that period. Scotland's migrant population increased by 105,000 over the period, Wales by 56,000 and Northern Ireland by 27,000. England effectively absorbed 11 times more migrants than the other three home nations combined, even though it is only five times as large in terms of total population.
Frank Field, Labour MP and co-chairman of the group, added: "This research shows that immigration is overwhelmingly an issue for England rather than other parts of the UK. England can expect a population increase of nearly 10 million people in the next 20 years or so, of which 7 million will be thanks to new immigration."
The Daily Telegraph told last year how England's population is growing at the fastest rate since records began and is now the most crowded major country in Europe after overtaking Holland. Figures showed that the population density is higher than ever before, with forecasts predicting 157 people for every square mile by 2011. This compares with 111 for every square mile when the figures started to be collected in 1931.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the think-tank Migrationwatch, said: "This paper really underlines that immigration is a problem for England, not the UK. "Those who favour continued immigration need to explain why we want an extra seven million people in what is already the most crowded country in Europe. "They also need to explain how we are going to pay for all the extra infrastructure when the public finances are already hugely in deficit."
SOURCE
Thursday, May 28, 2009
British working class children 'alienated' in private schools, says The Sutton Trust
Poor children given free places at top private schools often struggle to fit into the "elite atmosphere", according to research for The Sutton Trust. Bringing back the government-funded Grammar schools, where entrance is limited to those who perform well on an academic aptitude test, would largely solve that problem as many students in such schools are of working-class origin
Many pupils from deprived backgrounds feel "estranged and alienated" from other pupils and teachers if they are given places at leading establishments, it is claimed. In addition, some are unable to take part in cultural visits or foreign exchange trips because their parents cannot afford them.
The Sutton Trust, which commissioned the report, said the findings had serious implications for new rules designed to open independent schools to more children from working class backgrounds. Sir Peter Lampl, the charity's chairman, insisted schools needed to look beyond "the simple question of fees" to make sure pupils succeeded. Private school headmasters backed the conclusions, insisting that "plucking the best and the brightest pupils out of the state sector" was counter-productive.
In the latest study, researchers held in-depth interviews with adults who had been through the Conservatives' assisted places scheme in the 1980s and 90s. The programme - scrapped by Labour in 1997 - gave pupils from poor backgrounds free and subsidised admission to independent schools. Earlier research showed students with assisted places achieved better GCSE and A-level results than pupils remaining in the state sector. They were also much more likely to go onto Oxbridge.
But the latest report - called Embers from the Ashes? - said it was "far from an unqualified success". "Virtually all spoke of the fact that they could not participate in the 'semi-formal' activities in the school curriculum, such as field-trips, cultural visits or foreign exchange trips, because their parents could not afford to finance them," it said. "Also commonly mentioned was a lack of participation in weekend and after-school activities, compounded by very long journeys to and from school."
The report, based on interviews with 25 former pupils, said that "feeling like the poor relation" was the "defining characteristic of their time at school". "It appears that financial hardship combined with cultural discontinuity between the home and the school, contributes to a sense of stigmatisation," the study said.
Under Labour's 2006 Charities Act, fee-paying schools are no longer automatically entitled to charitable status. They must prove they provide "public benefit" to hang on to tax breaks worth an estimated 100m to the sector every year. Official guidance from the Charity Commission suggested the easiest way to pass the new test was "increasing general fee levels in order to offer subsidies to those unable to pay the full cost".
But Sir Peter called for more wholesale Government funding for private day schools - rather than "a few token places" - to break down the barriers between the two sectors. "The chance to democratise entry to 100 or more of our highest-performing academic schools should not be missed and would be a tremendous boost for social mobility," he said.
Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, Berkshire, said: "Plucking the best and the brightest pupils out of state schools may help the odd child but it is completely insufficient as a tool to bridge the gap between the two sectors."
SOURCE
NHS negligence: Thousands of medical records lost
Tens of thousands of medical records have been lost by the NHS (National Health Services) due to a series of data security leaks. The health organization has been asked by the Information Commissioner now to tighten their data security. This year, 140 security breaches took place in NHS between January and April, which exceed the total number of cases put together from the local authorities and the central government.
14 NHS institutes have been observed to have broken the data regulations. According to Mick Gorrill, assistant information commissioner, NHS has offended laws by losing such confidential information. In one instance, the database of 10,000 people was downloaded onto an insecure laptop and the laptop was said to have been stolen from the home of the NHS employee.
In another such case of negligence, a memory stick, which was carrying medical histories of ex-inmates of Preston prison and other 6,360 prison patients, was lost earlier. The password for obtaining the data was written on the device itself.
Gorill said that it is a matter of great concern that the data has been lost. It would cause obvious distress to the patients since the data is a confidential piece of information. Plus, he added, many insurance companies sometimes hire private detectives to find out vital information about the policy holder's medical history etc. He said that it is well understood what may happen if the data falls into the wrong hands.
According to Gorill, since the loss of data is inexcusable, the body will be fined accordingly for such incidences.
To examine how the medical data is stored in various hospitals in Britain, Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, plans to send a crack team of inspectors. Thomas has written a letter to a senior civil servant in the Department of Health for taking necessary steps for improvements. A spokesperson of the department said that they will soon reply to Thomas's letter.
SOURCE
British town halls will no longer bow to 'compensation culture' with plans afoot for thousands of new adventure playgrounds
Town hall chiefs performed a U-turn yesterday by calling on parents to shake-off the 'cotton wool culture'. Local Government Association members pledged they would 'not bow to the compensation culture' and vowed to press on and build thousands of adventure playgrounds.
However, local authorities have for years been behind bans on traditional games such as conkers and snowball fights, amid health and safety fears. In 2006 alone, 33 laws and more than 1,000 regulations were introduced designed to reduce possible risks faced by youngsters.
Experts have warned that anxious parents are raising a generation of 'battery-farmed kids' denied the independence, experience and education that comes from exploring the outdoor world. Just one in ten children play regularly in parks, fields and woods according to a survey commissioned by Natural England. Yet 81 per cent say they would like more freedom to play outside.
To address these concerns, the LGA is to sweep away the 'no ball games' culture with zip wires, tree houses and tunnels installed in parks. Council-run holiday schemes are also offering activities such as BMX biking and surfing. More than 3,500 playgrounds will be built or refurbished by 2011 under a 235million Government scheme.
LGA chairman Margaret Eaton said: 'Children playing outside is a fundamental part of growing up. 'We do our youngsters no favours by wrapping them up in cotton wool. Town halls are determined not to bow to the compensation culture.'
SOURCE
Senior judge blames slow police response times for Britain's 'vigilante culture'
A senior judge has warned of a rise in vigilante crimes caused by slow police response times. Richard Bray said citizens were increasingly taking matters into their own hands because of lack of confidence in the forces of law and order. He was speaking as he sentenced a father and his sons for attacking a man they thought had vandalised their car.
Mr Bray, a circuit judge at Northampton Crown Court, said: 'Nobody bothers to phone the police any more. They go round and sort it out themselves - and I know why. 'It is because the police do not actually come round so people go out themselves and deal with it.'
A police pledge, to which all 43 forces in the country have signed up, promises that in urban areas police will arrive within 15 minutes and in rural areas in 20 minutes. But Judge Bray's scathing comments make clear he feels they are falling short of those commitments.
The attack which prompted his outburst occurred last year when Henry Smith, 48, and his sons Ian, 23, and Jamie, 19, decided to take revenge for damage to their car. The men, from Kettering, went to a nearby house and punched a man to the ground. Ian Smith and his brother then punched and kicked him on the floor, leaving him with injuries to his face, teeth and mouth. Both admitted grievous bodily harm at a previous hearing.
Ian Smith was given a suspended jail sentence of 50 weeks and ordered to pay 1,000 to the victim. Jamie Smith received a 40-week suspended sentence and ordered to pay 1,500 compensation. Their father had pleaded guilty to affray and was ordered to pay costs. They were ordered to complete 390 hours of unpaid work between them. Matthew Sinclair, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'It is refreshing to hear a judge accept the extent to which ordinary people are being forced to fend for themselves thanks to the failure of the criminal justice system. 'This will continue so long as the police are forced to respond to the priorities of politicians rather than ordinary people. They'll spend their time trying to meet arbitrary and distorting targets rather than trying to catch serious criminals.'
A spokesman for the Home Office said it did not keep figures on how quickly officers responded to callout times, despite its pledge. The spokesman added that it was not possible to keep specific figures on vigilante crime.
A Northamptonshire Police spokesman said: 'The judge is entitled to his opinion but it is one we do not share. In the case he refers to, the incident in question was not reported to us so we were not in a position to respond. 'We invest heavily in officers, staff, training and technology to ensure members of the public can be confident of receiving a good service from Northamptonshire Police.'
SOURCE
Claim that 'climate change is the cholera of our era' ridiculed as 'load of garbage' by renowned disease expert
A May 25, 2009 article in the UK Times warning that "climate change is the cholera of our era" has raised the ire of an internationally known disease expert formerly of the UN IPCC.
"The article is a rehash of a similar load of garbage unloaded in 1996, plus (identical wording) other writings of the past, including, I suspect, IPCC," Dr. Paul Reiter told Climate Depot.
Reiter is a malaria expert formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control.
The UK Times article, by Professor Sir Muir Gray is Public Health Director of the Campaign for Greener Healthcare, alleges that man-made global warming is a greater threat to mankind than the scourge of cholera -- an acute diarrheal illness-- which killed an nearly 3000 people in Zimbabwe alone earlier this year. A May 26, 2009 article from VOA reveals cholera cases are expected to reach 100,000 in Zimbabwe alone.
Muir wrote in the UK Times: "In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era - fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution." "Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate change's threat to health," Muir added.
But Reiter, was blunt in his rebuttal to Muir's article in the UK Times. "They have cherry picked without remorse. I have huge response to my article in Malaria Journal. Yet these peddlers of garbage quote a 1998 model by two activists whose work is ridiculed by those of us who work in this field," Reiter continued. "What the hell can we do? I am flabbergasted that this can go on, and on, and on," Reiter, who is featured in the U.S. Senate Report of more than 700 dissenting scientists of man-made global warming, concluded.
Reiter was also formerly with the UN IPCC and was so appalled at UN IPCC process that he threatened legal action to get his name removed from the reports.
SOURCE
Poor children given free places at top private schools often struggle to fit into the "elite atmosphere", according to research for The Sutton Trust. Bringing back the government-funded Grammar schools, where entrance is limited to those who perform well on an academic aptitude test, would largely solve that problem as many students in such schools are of working-class origin
Many pupils from deprived backgrounds feel "estranged and alienated" from other pupils and teachers if they are given places at leading establishments, it is claimed. In addition, some are unable to take part in cultural visits or foreign exchange trips because their parents cannot afford them.
The Sutton Trust, which commissioned the report, said the findings had serious implications for new rules designed to open independent schools to more children from working class backgrounds. Sir Peter Lampl, the charity's chairman, insisted schools needed to look beyond "the simple question of fees" to make sure pupils succeeded. Private school headmasters backed the conclusions, insisting that "plucking the best and the brightest pupils out of the state sector" was counter-productive.
In the latest study, researchers held in-depth interviews with adults who had been through the Conservatives' assisted places scheme in the 1980s and 90s. The programme - scrapped by Labour in 1997 - gave pupils from poor backgrounds free and subsidised admission to independent schools. Earlier research showed students with assisted places achieved better GCSE and A-level results than pupils remaining in the state sector. They were also much more likely to go onto Oxbridge.
But the latest report - called Embers from the Ashes? - said it was "far from an unqualified success". "Virtually all spoke of the fact that they could not participate in the 'semi-formal' activities in the school curriculum, such as field-trips, cultural visits or foreign exchange trips, because their parents could not afford to finance them," it said. "Also commonly mentioned was a lack of participation in weekend and after-school activities, compounded by very long journeys to and from school."
The report, based on interviews with 25 former pupils, said that "feeling like the poor relation" was the "defining characteristic of their time at school". "It appears that financial hardship combined with cultural discontinuity between the home and the school, contributes to a sense of stigmatisation," the study said.
Under Labour's 2006 Charities Act, fee-paying schools are no longer automatically entitled to charitable status. They must prove they provide "public benefit" to hang on to tax breaks worth an estimated 100m to the sector every year. Official guidance from the Charity Commission suggested the easiest way to pass the new test was "increasing general fee levels in order to offer subsidies to those unable to pay the full cost".
But Sir Peter called for more wholesale Government funding for private day schools - rather than "a few token places" - to break down the barriers between the two sectors. "The chance to democratise entry to 100 or more of our highest-performing academic schools should not be missed and would be a tremendous boost for social mobility," he said.
Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, Berkshire, said: "Plucking the best and the brightest pupils out of state schools may help the odd child but it is completely insufficient as a tool to bridge the gap between the two sectors."
SOURCE
NHS negligence: Thousands of medical records lost
Tens of thousands of medical records have been lost by the NHS (National Health Services) due to a series of data security leaks. The health organization has been asked by the Information Commissioner now to tighten their data security. This year, 140 security breaches took place in NHS between January and April, which exceed the total number of cases put together from the local authorities and the central government.
14 NHS institutes have been observed to have broken the data regulations. According to Mick Gorrill, assistant information commissioner, NHS has offended laws by losing such confidential information. In one instance, the database of 10,000 people was downloaded onto an insecure laptop and the laptop was said to have been stolen from the home of the NHS employee.
In another such case of negligence, a memory stick, which was carrying medical histories of ex-inmates of Preston prison and other 6,360 prison patients, was lost earlier. The password for obtaining the data was written on the device itself.
Gorill said that it is a matter of great concern that the data has been lost. It would cause obvious distress to the patients since the data is a confidential piece of information. Plus, he added, many insurance companies sometimes hire private detectives to find out vital information about the policy holder's medical history etc. He said that it is well understood what may happen if the data falls into the wrong hands.
According to Gorill, since the loss of data is inexcusable, the body will be fined accordingly for such incidences.
To examine how the medical data is stored in various hospitals in Britain, Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, plans to send a crack team of inspectors. Thomas has written a letter to a senior civil servant in the Department of Health for taking necessary steps for improvements. A spokesperson of the department said that they will soon reply to Thomas's letter.
SOURCE
British town halls will no longer bow to 'compensation culture' with plans afoot for thousands of new adventure playgrounds
Town hall chiefs performed a U-turn yesterday by calling on parents to shake-off the 'cotton wool culture'. Local Government Association members pledged they would 'not bow to the compensation culture' and vowed to press on and build thousands of adventure playgrounds.
However, local authorities have for years been behind bans on traditional games such as conkers and snowball fights, amid health and safety fears. In 2006 alone, 33 laws and more than 1,000 regulations were introduced designed to reduce possible risks faced by youngsters.
Experts have warned that anxious parents are raising a generation of 'battery-farmed kids' denied the independence, experience and education that comes from exploring the outdoor world. Just one in ten children play regularly in parks, fields and woods according to a survey commissioned by Natural England. Yet 81 per cent say they would like more freedom to play outside.
To address these concerns, the LGA is to sweep away the 'no ball games' culture with zip wires, tree houses and tunnels installed in parks. Council-run holiday schemes are also offering activities such as BMX biking and surfing. More than 3,500 playgrounds will be built or refurbished by 2011 under a 235million Government scheme.
LGA chairman Margaret Eaton said: 'Children playing outside is a fundamental part of growing up. 'We do our youngsters no favours by wrapping them up in cotton wool. Town halls are determined not to bow to the compensation culture.'
SOURCE
Senior judge blames slow police response times for Britain's 'vigilante culture'
A senior judge has warned of a rise in vigilante crimes caused by slow police response times. Richard Bray said citizens were increasingly taking matters into their own hands because of lack of confidence in the forces of law and order. He was speaking as he sentenced a father and his sons for attacking a man they thought had vandalised their car.
Mr Bray, a circuit judge at Northampton Crown Court, said: 'Nobody bothers to phone the police any more. They go round and sort it out themselves - and I know why. 'It is because the police do not actually come round so people go out themselves and deal with it.'
A police pledge, to which all 43 forces in the country have signed up, promises that in urban areas police will arrive within 15 minutes and in rural areas in 20 minutes. But Judge Bray's scathing comments make clear he feels they are falling short of those commitments.
The attack which prompted his outburst occurred last year when Henry Smith, 48, and his sons Ian, 23, and Jamie, 19, decided to take revenge for damage to their car. The men, from Kettering, went to a nearby house and punched a man to the ground. Ian Smith and his brother then punched and kicked him on the floor, leaving him with injuries to his face, teeth and mouth. Both admitted grievous bodily harm at a previous hearing.
Ian Smith was given a suspended jail sentence of 50 weeks and ordered to pay 1,000 to the victim. Jamie Smith received a 40-week suspended sentence and ordered to pay 1,500 compensation. Their father had pleaded guilty to affray and was ordered to pay costs. They were ordered to complete 390 hours of unpaid work between them. Matthew Sinclair, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'It is refreshing to hear a judge accept the extent to which ordinary people are being forced to fend for themselves thanks to the failure of the criminal justice system. 'This will continue so long as the police are forced to respond to the priorities of politicians rather than ordinary people. They'll spend their time trying to meet arbitrary and distorting targets rather than trying to catch serious criminals.'
A spokesman for the Home Office said it did not keep figures on how quickly officers responded to callout times, despite its pledge. The spokesman added that it was not possible to keep specific figures on vigilante crime.
A Northamptonshire Police spokesman said: 'The judge is entitled to his opinion but it is one we do not share. In the case he refers to, the incident in question was not reported to us so we were not in a position to respond. 'We invest heavily in officers, staff, training and technology to ensure members of the public can be confident of receiving a good service from Northamptonshire Police.'
SOURCE
Claim that 'climate change is the cholera of our era' ridiculed as 'load of garbage' by renowned disease expert
A May 25, 2009 article in the UK Times warning that "climate change is the cholera of our era" has raised the ire of an internationally known disease expert formerly of the UN IPCC.
"The article is a rehash of a similar load of garbage unloaded in 1996, plus (identical wording) other writings of the past, including, I suspect, IPCC," Dr. Paul Reiter told Climate Depot.
Reiter is a malaria expert formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control.
The UK Times article, by Professor Sir Muir Gray is Public Health Director of the Campaign for Greener Healthcare, alleges that man-made global warming is a greater threat to mankind than the scourge of cholera -- an acute diarrheal illness-- which killed an nearly 3000 people in Zimbabwe alone earlier this year. A May 26, 2009 article from VOA reveals cholera cases are expected to reach 100,000 in Zimbabwe alone.
Muir wrote in the UK Times: "In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era - fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution." "Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate change's threat to health," Muir added.
But Reiter, was blunt in his rebuttal to Muir's article in the UK Times. "They have cherry picked without remorse. I have huge response to my article in Malaria Journal. Yet these peddlers of garbage quote a 1998 model by two activists whose work is ridiculed by those of us who work in this field," Reiter continued. "What the hell can we do? I am flabbergasted that this can go on, and on, and on," Reiter, who is featured in the U.S. Senate Report of more than 700 dissenting scientists of man-made global warming, concluded.
Reiter was also formerly with the UN IPCC and was so appalled at UN IPCC process that he threatened legal action to get his name removed from the reports.
SOURCE
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Why oh why do a few Jews make it hard for Jews generally??
Once again I am going to go out on a limb and half cut off the branch behind me. But I seem to be one of the few who is ready to speak the unspeakable so I think I should take up that burden again.
Jews are overall exceptionally generous givers. They donate large amounts to charities and to causes that they see as worthy. I gather that around 50% of the funding for Mr Obama's election campaign came from Jews, despite the fact that Jews are only a small fraction of the U.S. population. You may question the wisdom of those donations (I do) but you cannot fault the generosity of them.
Sadly, however, that is good news and one look at any newspaper will tell you that it is bad news that people are interested in and take note of. And bad news about Jews will, sadly, be particularly noted. Jews are just too prominent in the community for it to be otherwise. And one set of foul deeds can negate a large set of good deeds.
So I come to Mr Anthony Steen (Stein) above. He is one of Britain's most well-known Jews. He has been a member of parliament since 1974 and in that time has served on many public bodies. His appalling behaviour has been noted on several occasions -- abusing a secretary who did not know who he was, parking his car in disabled zones etc. And he has always been impenitent about his misdeeds, though an apology usually gets forced out of him eventually.
In his latest performance he has however excelled himself. He is one of the many British politicians who have been caught up in the scandal of misused personal expense allowances. Most of those caught have shown embarrassment and been penitent to some degree but Steen was at his most impenitent when he was confronted and refused to admit to any wrongdoing at all. You can read the whole sorry story here. Rather than admitting any fault for his large and improper expenses claims, he went on the attack and said that his critics were just jealous of his large house -- which of course put pictures of his house into most British newspapers. See above.
It is hard to convey how offensive all that would have been to most Brits. The British are characterized by a self-effacing culture. If you inadvertently tread on a British man's foot, HE will usually apologize, despite being the injured party. Arrogance, ostentation and boasting are about as un-British as you can get. And yet here is a well-known Jew flaunting all those characteristics in public.
Perhaps there are occasions when that would not matter but Britain now is not one of them. Antisemitism has in recent years become acceptable in conversations among Britain's educated classes. And Steen will be seen as a graphic confirmation of all those opinions.
To be a Jew is to be in the public eye and given all the accusations that have been levelled at Jews over the years, people will be alert to bad Jewish behaviour. It may not be entirely rational but that is the way it is. One foul man can destroy the good work of thousands. It is the bad news that will be noted, not the good.
The only reason I am writing this at all is that I am aware that there is a certain cohesion among the Jewish community in a given area. If they do not see one another at shul, they see one-another at charitable functions etc. And it is my probably vain hope that the wiser members of such communities will press other Jews to avoid public displays of arrogance and ostentation. Perhaps that already happens to some degree but I think it should be carried to the point of shunning any offenders who do not reform. That way, if someone like Anthony Steen comes to public notice again, members of the local Jewish community can say: "We do not recognize him as one of us. We deplore his behaviour as much as you do".
That could be a big help.
Once again I am going to go out on a limb and half cut off the branch behind me. But I seem to be one of the few who is ready to speak the unspeakable so I think I should take up that burden again.
Jews are overall exceptionally generous givers. They donate large amounts to charities and to causes that they see as worthy. I gather that around 50% of the funding for Mr Obama's election campaign came from Jews, despite the fact that Jews are only a small fraction of the U.S. population. You may question the wisdom of those donations (I do) but you cannot fault the generosity of them.
Sadly, however, that is good news and one look at any newspaper will tell you that it is bad news that people are interested in and take note of. And bad news about Jews will, sadly, be particularly noted. Jews are just too prominent in the community for it to be otherwise. And one set of foul deeds can negate a large set of good deeds.
So I come to Mr Anthony Steen (Stein) above. He is one of Britain's most well-known Jews. He has been a member of parliament since 1974 and in that time has served on many public bodies. His appalling behaviour has been noted on several occasions -- abusing a secretary who did not know who he was, parking his car in disabled zones etc. And he has always been impenitent about his misdeeds, though an apology usually gets forced out of him eventually.
In his latest performance he has however excelled himself. He is one of the many British politicians who have been caught up in the scandal of misused personal expense allowances. Most of those caught have shown embarrassment and been penitent to some degree but Steen was at his most impenitent when he was confronted and refused to admit to any wrongdoing at all. You can read the whole sorry story here. Rather than admitting any fault for his large and improper expenses claims, he went on the attack and said that his critics were just jealous of his large house -- which of course put pictures of his house into most British newspapers. See above.
It is hard to convey how offensive all that would have been to most Brits. The British are characterized by a self-effacing culture. If you inadvertently tread on a British man's foot, HE will usually apologize, despite being the injured party. Arrogance, ostentation and boasting are about as un-British as you can get. And yet here is a well-known Jew flaunting all those characteristics in public.
Perhaps there are occasions when that would not matter but Britain now is not one of them. Antisemitism has in recent years become acceptable in conversations among Britain's educated classes. And Steen will be seen as a graphic confirmation of all those opinions.
To be a Jew is to be in the public eye and given all the accusations that have been levelled at Jews over the years, people will be alert to bad Jewish behaviour. It may not be entirely rational but that is the way it is. One foul man can destroy the good work of thousands. It is the bad news that will be noted, not the good.
The only reason I am writing this at all is that I am aware that there is a certain cohesion among the Jewish community in a given area. If they do not see one another at shul, they see one-another at charitable functions etc. And it is my probably vain hope that the wiser members of such communities will press other Jews to avoid public displays of arrogance and ostentation. Perhaps that already happens to some degree but I think it should be carried to the point of shunning any offenders who do not reform. That way, if someone like Anthony Steen comes to public notice again, members of the local Jewish community can say: "We do not recognize him as one of us. We deplore his behaviour as much as you do".
That could be a big help.
I'll sue to get my son a proper education, says British father after school limits academic subjects in favour of 'practical' GCSEs
A father is threatening to sue his son's state school for failing to provide a proper academic education. Peter Hills says teenagers are forced to sideline traditional academic subjects in favour of vocational qualifications when choosing GCSE courses. His son Alex, 14, wants to take a full set of academic GCSEs, but his school is making him choose at least one practical course in either Information and Communication Technology (ICT), art or drama. This must take the place of one of his four preferred options: history, geography, French and music.
Mr Hills has written to Children's Secretary Ed Balls to complain that his son faces almost a day a week studying for a qualification in which he has no interest. The transport company director, who lives in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, with his wife Nicky, believes he will be forced to pay for private education for Alex instead - and is consulting solicitors about suing the school for part of the cost.
Alex studies at nearby Eastwood School, which specialises in performing arts and sport. Pupils studying GCSEs there must choose one vocational course - a BTEC in art, a BTEC in performing arts or an OCR National in ICT. This counts as one subject choice, in addition to the compulsory core subjects of English, maths, science and RE. However, it is taught for four periods a week instead of the two allocated to other options.
Mr Hills wrote: 'While I am aware that The Eastwood School has a leaning towards the performing arts and sports, it is surely required to make an equal effort in providing a full academic education for those that require it.
He said the school's specialisms 'appear to be given prominence over all academic subjects, ie history, geography and languages, which surely should be the cornerstone of education in this country'. He added: 'If this matter cannot be resolved, then I feel I will have no option other than to send my child to a private school willing to provide the education best suited to his abilities, and to recover part of the cost from The Eastwood School via the county court.'
Mr Hills said: 'We have sought legal advice to see whether or not it is possible to obtain redress. It is at an early stage. 'What the state is providing, in my opinion and that of just about everyone else I have spoken to, is not suitable.'
The Education Act 2002 says that schools have a legal duty to offer all 14 to 16-year- olds suitable learning challenges and a broad curriculum - including entitlements to study the arts, humanities and languages. Lawyers for Mr Hills are likely to consider if Eastwood School has properly fulfilled these duties.
He said he was very doubtful about the ICT qualification Alex would probably end up taking. He believes the subject matter will soon be obsolete. Ofsted urged the Government to 'evaluate the degree of challenge' the qualification poses, in a report this year. It noted that two major ICT courses, one of which is understood to be the OCR National, count as four GCSEs in school league tables but typically take half the time to teach. 'Students were able to meet the criteria, whether or not they had understood what they had done,' the report said.
SOURCE
Half-witted British doctor says climate change is the cholera of our era
See below. He of all people should know that cold (as in winter) kills a lot more people than warmth (as in summer). He should be celebrating warming if it were public health that concerned him. But Professor Sir Muir Gray is obviously an establishment figure who is just doing his best to uphold establishment beliefs. He didn't get a knighthood for rocking the boat
In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era - fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution. And just as doctors led the Victorian campaign, so the medical profession should be in the vanguard of this new revolution in public health.
The front page of The Lancet of May 16 says it all: "Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century." This prestigious journal, which usually gives no more than ten pages to vitally important clinical research, made space for a 39-page report.
Climate change will hit the poorest nations hardest, but it will affect us too. In the summer of 2003, la canicule, an unexpected heatwave, killed 14,000 elderly people in France. Rising temperatures will bring that type of problem to our shores. Our health services will be put under pressure by severe weather and floods. But it is the global effects that will hit us, and especially our children and grandchildren, because of the effect that climate change will have on world food and water supplies; millions of climate refugees will disrupt the borders of even an island nation.
Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate change's threat to health. That proposition will instantly provoke a hostile reaction from the diminishing band of climate-change sceptics. But as a doctor of 40 years' standing who has been involved in running public health services for 30 years, I know that the evidence is good enough to make action, not inaction, the sensible choice. An empirical view of the data shows that delay will not just increase the amount of preventable harm, it may take us past a point of no return.
So the medical profession must accept responsibility in the campaign for change. However, with a few notable exceptions, doctors are effectively silent on the health threat that will come to define our age. My fellow doctors cannot just leave this issue to their leaders, to the presidents of the Royal Colleges and to the members of the Climate and Health Council. They should be active in their local communities, where they are known and respected, using their influence to press for national and international action.
Leaders, no matter how great, must have courage and a mandate to act. What is needed, for instance, is for 20 or 30 MPs to collar Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, as he rushes across the lobby and say: "Three [or more] doctors have been to my surgery in the last month warning me about the concern that they and their patients have about climate change - that's more doctors than have ever come to see me about the NHS or even their pay. They tell me the medical profession is clear what needs to be done."
"Why do I never get letters from doctors about smoking?" an MP asked me when I was the secretary of Action on Smoking and Health. "Why do I get more letters on animal welfare than human health?" Why indeed. The medical profession is too silent, and sometimes too apathetic. Fortunately, many of today's medical students and young doctors have fire in their bellies and are taking to the streets demanding action. Their older colleagues should join them and use their influence. Perhaps, they could try some "collar-and-tie" direct action - those doctors who own shares should be at AGMs demanding that companies clean up their environmental acts.
But the medical profession needs to put its own house in order too. I was in a hospital last month that is doubling its electricity supply "to meet demand", with no thought about the future. Sometimes the NHS is not unlike Dickens's Mrs Jellyby, keen to reform others while her own children were scalded through neglect.
The NHS is gigantic and has a carbon footprint that is nearly one twentieth of the whole UK's footprint - 1.3 million staff each with their own footprint, the drugs bought, the buildings, the transport, the water and the food, too much of it thrown away. Now is the time for the profession to mobilise and show the passion that took them into medical school but is then so often extinguished.
In December in Copenhagen, the vital United Nations Climate Change Conference meets. Unfortunately, British MPs are distracted, so the medical profession has a duty to act to make the politicians focus on it.
A recent summit meeting of leading doctors at the British Medical Association unanimously agreed that the need for action is essential. However, battles are not won in headquarters but by the troops on the front line. So I would like to see 90 per cent of doctors making environmentally friendly personal changes; half of doctors signing the Climate and Health Council pledge; and at least one in 20 doctors lobbying their MPs face-to-face. What more appropriate place than a constituency surgery could there be for a doctor to tell his or her MP that the medical profession thinks that urgent treatment is needed?
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Windfarms a security threat
The body that monitors UK airspace is seeking a solution to the potentially disastrous problem of commercial and military aircraft disappearing in radar blackout zones caused by wind farms. National Air Traffic Services (Nats) has asked Raytheon, the American defence company, to design the world's first system for allowing radar to see through wind farm interference. The cost of the 5 million project is expected to be picked up by the wind energy industry.
Wind farm turbines create a Doppler effect as they turn, which shows up on radar screens. As the area and number of these wind farms has increased, the number of radar blackout zones has also risen. Aircraft passing through the area can disappear in the blackout and air traffic controllers can lose their exact position. The Royal Air Force is concerned that enemy bombers or other aircraft could hide behind interference from offshore wind farms and approach Britain undetected.
A Nats spokesman said: "We have a duty to safeguard our operations, so in the past we have objected to the development of a number of wind farms that threaten aircraft safety. We need a system that can eliminate this problem."
Raytheon has been asked to create a software system that will filter out the wind farm noise from other radar signals. This will effectively allow air traffic controllers to see through the wind farms. The company, which is the largest manufacturer of radar systems in the world, hopes to complete the project by the end of next year. Once completed, it will also be deployed in the Netherlands.
Andy Zogg, vice-president of command and control systems at Raytheon, said: "As the number of wind farms grows, there are more and more of these radar black holes. They show up as clutter on the radar screen and the concern is that aircraft approaching from behind the turbines or flying over them cannot be seen."
Brian Smith, general manager of Raytheon Canada, said: "Our work will be to develop the algorithms that allow us to discriminate between turbines and aircraft. It is called clutter erasure."
The Government has identified wind power as a key to reducing reliance on carbon dioxide producing energy sources. Europe's largest onshore wind farm opened last week at Whitelee in Scotland. The 140 turbines cover an area of 55 square kilometres and are each 110 metres high. The wind farm will generate enough electricity to power 250,000 homes.
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Britain wastes huge sums on windmills while the need for reliable electicity supplies becomes ever more urgent and costly
On a barren hillside outside Glasgow, dozens of wind turbines are spinning in the breeze as Britain's largest onshore wind park starts to generate electricity. With 140 turbines producing enough power to supply tens of thousands of homes, it is among the largest and most vivid symbols of the Government's drive to replace Britain's collection of ageing coal, gas and oil-fired power stations with a cleaner, greener alternative.
But this effort to transform Britain's energy industry, which is being propelled by tough new emissions rules and by the sheer decrepitude of much of the network, does not come cheap and has profound implications for consumers.
The site, at Whitelee on Eaglesham Moor, has cost ScottishPower, its developer, 300 million, but this is a tiny fraction of what will be required to upgrade Britain's power network. According to Ernst & Young, the total cost of doing so and meeting tough targets to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020 will be no less than 233.5 billion. Although some of that burden is likely to be shared with power companies, the figure, divided among the UK's 26million households, implies a total bill of up to 8,977 each - or 598 a year for the next 15 years.
Tony Ward, power and utilities partner at Ernst & Young, said that about half of the total, or 112 billion, will need to be spent building new supplies of renewable energy, including vast new offshore wind parks - each many times the size of Whitelee - as well as biomass-fired power stations, tidal and wave-energy projects.
Britain must also renew almost all of its ageing nuclear power plants, which account for about 20 per cent of the country's electricity supply, a project that is expected to add 38.4 billion to the cost. A further 28 billion or so will have to be poured into the grid to build a transmission network capable of supporting new reactors and remote wind parks sited as far north as the Shetlands and in the North Sea. This excludes the cost of building new coal-fired stations equipped with carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), bolstering the UK's gas storage facilities, new gas-fired power plants and a rollout of "smart meters" in every home and business in the country.
Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, whose company will be at the centre of this effort, said: "It's very clear from the renewables and new nuclear stations being planned that there is going to be a need for a substantial increase in investment to build a modern, 21st-century grid."
He expects National Grid alone to spend up to 5 billion a year from 2012 and he is already drawing up plans for a network of seabed cables feeding renewable electricity from Scotland to consumers in the South, as well as sweeping reinforcements to conventional high-voltage lines that criss-cross the country.
Craig Lowrey, director of markets for EIC, the energy consultancy, said: "These are massive investments - we are talking about potentially the biggest investment programme in Britain's history. But if the Government is serious about meeting its emissions targets, it needs to make people understand the true scale of these costs."
Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish & Southern Energy, Britain's second-largest utility, takes a similar view: "In the long term, the unit price of energy is going to have to go up significantly. We are going to have to produce energy in a greener and more secure way and that will cost money."
Ernst & Young's figures might underestimate the total expense because they do not include regular maintenance costs, Mr Marchant said, suggesting that a figure of 300 billion could be closer to the mark. However, he is optimistic that dramatic improvements in energy efficiency could mean that consumer bills will remain stable or even fall in the long term.
The fear is that in Britain's liberalised energy market this tidal wave of required investment simply will not materialise.
Dr Lowrey believes that, under its current structure - which relies on market forces plus consumer-funded incentives designed to boost investment in renewable energy - the scale of investment needed is unlikely either to meet expectations or to be allocated in the way that the Government or society wants. It is a concern that has been compounded in recent months by a collapse in funding that has accompanied the credit crunch and the plunging value of the pound, forcing up the cost of imported power-generating equipment.
The falling prices of oil, coal and gas have also undermined the economic rationale of many investments in more costly, alternative forms of energy. "There is a need for greater intervention to make this investment a reality," Dr Lowrey said. "We need a guiding hand from government."
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Climate Change Act: Now the world faces its biggest ever bill
One of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to "stop climate change", observes Christopher Booker.
One measure of the fantasy world now inhabited by our sad MPs was the mindless way that they nodded through, last October, by 463 votes to three, by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever to go through Parliament. This was the Climate Change Act, obliging the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to reduce Britain's "carbon emissions" by 2050 to 20 per cent of what they were in 1990 - a target achievable only by shutting down most of the economy.
Such is the zombie state of our MPs that they agreed to this lunatic measure without the Government giving any idea of what this might cost. Only one, Peter Lilley, raised this question, and it was he who, last month, alerted me to the fact that the minister, Ed Miliband, had at last slipped out a figure on his website (without bothering to tell Parliament). The Government's estimate was 404 billion, or 18 billion a year, or 760 per household every year for four decades.
Such figures, produced by a computer model, are, of course, meaningless. But one of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to "stop climate change".
Last week I dined with Professor Bob Carter, a distinguished Australian paleoclimatologist, who has been trying to alert politicians in Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand to the scarcely believable cost of these proposals. He gave me a paper he presented to a committee of New Zealand MPs. China and India, as the price of their participating in the UN's planned "Kyoto Two" deal to be agreed in Copenhagen next December, are demanding that developed countries, including Britain, should pay them 1 per cent of their GDP, totalling up to more than $300 billion every year.
Africa is putting in for a further $267 billion a year. South American countries are demanding hundreds of billions more. In the US, the latest costing of President Obama's "cap and trade" Bill is $1.9 trillion, a yearly cost to each US family of $4,500.
Meanwhile, as Mr Obama's Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, babbles on the BBC's Today programme about how the world's energy needs can be met by wind and solar power (for which, he assured us, we would need to cover only 5 per cent of the planet's deserts with solar panels), a study shows that for every job created in Spain's "alternative energy industry" since 2000, 2.2 others have been lost. (Mr Obama talks about creating "five million green jobs" in the US.)
Last week the BBC and various newspapers excitably greeted the opening by Alex Salmond of Whitelee, "Europe's largest onshore wind farm", 140 giant 2.3 megawatt turbines covering 30 square miles of moorland south-east of Glasgow. It was happily reported that these would "generate" 322MW of electricity, "enough to power every home in Glasgow". They won't, of course, do anything of the kind. Due to the vagaries of the wind, this colossal enterprise will produce only 80MW on average, a quarter of its capacity and barely enough to keep half Glasgow's lights on.
It really is time people stopped recycling the thoroughly bogus propaganda claims of the wind industry in this way. Any journalist who still falls for these lies by confusing turbines' "capacity" with their actual output is either thoroughly stupid or dishonest. The truth is that the 80MW average output of "Europe's largest wind farm" is only a fraction of that of any conventional power station, at twice the cost. For this derisory amount of power, the hidden subsidy to Whitelee over its 25-year life will, on current figures, be 1 billion, paid by all of us through our electricity bills.
Truly, our world has gone off its head, and no one seems to notice - not least those wretched MPs who allow all this to happen without having the faintest idea what is going on.
On May 15, the Guardian's famed environmental crusader George Monbiot triumphantly posted on his blog an item headed "How to disprove Christopher Booker in 26 seconds". This was the time, he claimed, it took him to discover how the figures that I had reported on the melting of Arctic ice were wrong.
Guardian groupies piled in to congratulate him, calling for my editor to sack me. Then one or two suggested he should look again at what I wrote. Three hours later, a disclaimer appeared at the top of his blog: "Whoops - looks like I've boobed. Sorry folks". The Great Moonbat conceded that he had been looking at the wrong figures. Still, it was good of him to admit it - and at least his blog ended up with an impressive 514 comments.
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Absurd British immigration clearance procedures
"Tougher" rules have been accompanied by much more lax enforcement. The letter below from a recently retired British immigration official appeared in "The Times" so may attract some attention
I worked at the immigration coalface for 38 years, including spending a number of spells as an entry clearance officer abroad. Your recent reports (May 21) echo the concerns of many recently retired immigration service personnel and many still within the ranks of the UK Border Agency.
The new points system for visa applications, brought about because of an insistence in drastically cutting costs to the detriment of security and a fair and firm immigration process, has devastated the visa officer network that had successfully operated for many years. Whereas previously most visa/entry clearance officers were UK-based, highly trained immigration service or Foreign Office staff, well versed in ferreting out the obvious and at times the not so obvious bogus student, now most applications are now dealt with on a "tick box" system, rather than by personal interview. More and more visa officers are locally engaged staff who are not British citizens and in many cases have never even visited Britain. To leave the security of this country and the implementation of UK government immigration policy in their hands is ridiculous.
In Mumbai some years ago I interviewed a young Indian student coming to study a fairly high level IT course; his papers were in order as were the arrangements for finance. Asked what he used the mouse for on a computer he said he did not leave his computer on the floor so a mouse would not get near it! A few more questions revealed he had absolutely no knowledge of IT and his visa application was refused. Would the current system have revealed this? Of course not. Furthermore, immigration officers at UK ports of entry are now actively discouraged from interviewing visa holders on arrival as this is considered too time consuming and not a good use of resources; "no second bite of the cherry" being the common mantra. This despite the knowledge that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of bogus students arriving annually.
If the Government is serious in its wish to have an effective visa and border control system, then financial consideration must not be its highest priority.
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Fewer taking history GCSE as British pupils abandon traditional subjects
Fewer teenagers are taking GCSEs in history as pupils abandon traditional subjects in favour of new-style skills classes, according to research
Ofsted, the education watchdog, says pupils' knowledge of history - including the Second World War - is 'often very patchy'. Less than a third of students sat history exams last summer - the second-lowest number since Labour came to power. The disclosure - in figures published by the Conservatives - comes amid claims that mainstays of the curriculum are increasingly being marginalised in state schools.
More students have been put onto vocational courses in subjects such as ICT (information and communication technology) - which often count for as many as four GCSEs - to boost schools' positions in national league tables. Last September, the Government also introduced new diploma qualifications in five practical areas, including health, engineering and media, to rival GCSEs and A-levels.
The Conservatives claim entries for traditional subjects are increasingly being dominated by students from private and grammar schools, undermining the chances of comprehensive school pupils getting into top universities. According to Tory figures, 35.4 per cent of 15 and 16-year-olds took a GCSE in history when Labour came to power in 1997. Some 379,280 teenagers missed out on studying the subject, it was revealed. But numbers slumped to a record low in 2007 when only 30.9 per cent of pupils took a history GCSE, meaning 453,679 teenagers left school without studying the subject properly. Numbers increased slightly last summer to 31 per cent. The Conservatives claim the overall slump has left many children without a decent grasp of the past.
According to a 2007 report by Ofsted, the education watchdog, pupils' knowledge of history is "often very patchy and specific; they are unable to sufficiently link discrete historical events to answer big questions".
Michael Gove, the Tory shadow schools secretary, said: "The number of children studying history beyond fourteen has fallen to less than one pupil in three. The Government's league tables encourage schools to push pupils away from harder subjects, even if they are of more long term value."
The Tories also criticised the Government's new primary school curriculum, which was published last month, claiming it would "further water down history" for the youngest pupils. Under plans, traditional subject headings will be removed in place of six broad "areas of learning". History has been merged into new "historical, geographical and social understanding" lessons, which also include a focus on sustainability, climate change, recycling, human rights and a requirement to learn about the role of local authority councillors and MPs. "All these reforms take us completely in the wrong direction," said Mr Gove.
A decline in the number of students taking history at school has already been heavily criticised. Last year, one leading examination board threatened to axe its least popular GCSE subjects, including classical civilisation, following a decline in interest. The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance axed its separate Latin and Ancient Greek languages GCSE courses in 2004.
A DCSF spokesperson said: "All pupils must study History up to the age of 14. Students are offered a range of options for GCSE and history remains a popular choice for young people, both at GCSE and A Level. The proportion of GCSE entrants studying history increased in 2008, of which 68 per cent achieved grades A*-C. "What is clear is that throughout their school careers, pupils gain a wide knowledge of British history - from Roman Britain to World War II."
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NHS criticised by Harley Street doctor for 'missing Jade Goody's cancer diagnosis'
A Harley Street consultant who treated Jade Goody has attacked the NHS for allegedly failing to spot her cancer earlier. Jade Goody died in her sleep at home on Mother's Day
Dr Ann Coxon, a doctor introduced to Goody last year was said to be "very angry" over an alleged failure to spot her illness earlier. Dr Coxon will speak in the E4 documentary Jade: As Seen On TV to be broadcast on Thursday night, according to Max Clifford, her publicist.
He said "Her doctor was very upset and very angry with the way the NHS looked after her and failed to diagnose the cancer that was growing for such a long time," he said. Goody, who died on Mother's Day earlier this year, was given a diagnosis of cervical cancer while taking part in the Indian version of Celebrity Big Brother last August.
The mother-of-two and former dental nurse, who was originally from Bermondsey, south London, first came into the public spotlight in 2002 when she appeared in the third series of the Channel 4 reality programme Big Brother.
In an interview in September, Goody said she had no plans to sue the NHS hospital she claimed was late in diagnosing her illness. "They (the hospital) should have actually spotted that there was something wrong a long time ago," she said. "I don't hate them, I'm not angry with them. Sorry - I don't hate them, I don't want to start suing them or stuff like that, because personally I don't think it's morally right to sue an NHS hospital. "All that's gonna do is take more money out of it and then more people are gonna suffer." She added: "I just think: it's not going to get my womb back, it's not going to get my health back. So what's the point?"
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Grow old gracefully to keep dementia at bay
Amusing. Below is a recitation of popular assertions about Alzheimer's. See here for my comments on the "growing old" study that he refers to. As is usual among journalists, he has ignored all the ifs and buts in the study concerned. His recommendations are a house built on sand. Yet the article comes from "The Times", of London, which makes it likely to be widely trusted
Working until you are 70 instead of 65 is one of the ways that you can minimise the risk of brain disease in later life. The Government is rumoured to be considering raising the retirement age to 70 in an attempt to reduce the national debt - plans that will have been given a useful fillip by new research that reveals postponing retirement can delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease.
According to researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, at the Maudsley Hospital, southeast London, every extra year worked delays the onset of dementia by just over a month. So working until you are 70 instead of 65 is likely to give you an extra six Alzheimer-free months. I am not sure that is enough of a benefit to warrant the additional effort, but extending your working life is not the only thing you can do to protect yourself.
One person in 20 over the age of 65 in the UK has some form of dementia. Alzheimer's disease - characterised by a loss of brain cells, shrinkage and protein deposits forming tangles and plaques throughout the brain - may be the most common form, but it is not the only one. Gradual furring up of the arteries supplying the brain accounts for at least 20 per cent of cases and causes similar impairment to Alzheimer's with resulting loss of memory and cognitive ability, disorientation and confusion. And, while there isn't much we can do to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease, there is a lot that can be done to keep our brain and its circulation healthy - and the healthier your brain the less noticeable any deficit is going to be.
Use it or lose it. The brain is often compared to a muscle in that "exercising" it can slow the damage time brings, and challenging yourself mentally every day will help to keep you sharp. The latter can include hobbies, keeping up an active social life, learning new skills, doing crosswords and puzzles and brain-training games and, as the recent research has shown, working for longer.
The brain is made up of around 100 billion nerve cells, each connected to thousands of others through synapses and it is a decrease in this interconnectivity, rather than the loss of brain cells alone, that is responsible for the slowing of mental agility that occurs with advancing years. Challenging the brain is thought to help by maintaining existing synapses and encouraging the formation of new ones...
Check for diabetes. Ask the nurse at your doctor's surgery for a blood test if you suspect diabetes - clues include a great thirst, peeing more than normal, recurring infections such as boils or thrush, lack of energy and blurred vision. Those most at risk include the overweight, anyone with a family history of the condition and those of Asian and Afro-Caribbean origin.
Drink in moderation. While sensible drinking - the equivalent of two or three small glasses of wine on most days for a woman and three to four for a man - can protect against some forms of dementia, heavy drinking has the opposite effect. One recent review suggests that alcohol accounts for at least 10 per cent of all UK dementia cases. You don't have to be middle-aged or elderly to be at risk: there is evidence that heavy drinkers in their thirties and forties already have significant memory impairment.
Eat oily fish. Fresh tuna and tinned salmon, or fish oil capsules, may protect against Alzheimer's disease and improve brain function. The exact mode of this protection is now under investigation, but it is thought that the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oils may slow the formation of plaques - an effect that may be enhanced by fatty acids also seeming to protect the delicate lining of the arteries supplying the brain, thus helping to maintain good blood flow. One American study found that men and women eating at least one portion of fish a week were half as likely to develop Alzheimer's as those who didn't eat any.
But the case is not so strong for another popular brain supplement. It is thought that as many as one person in ten with dementia is now taking ginkgo biloba despite the latest evidence, which suggests that, while the herb may boost blood supply to the brain, this doesn't translate into any significant benefit.
Consider hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Women who take HRT have been shown in a number of studies to be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease later in life. But HRT has no impact on the progression of the disease once a woman develops the condition. Bottom line? It is a useful side benefit, but concerns about Alzheimer's disease on their own are not a strong enough indication to prescribe HRT in women who are not having menopausal symptoms.
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Catholic Church is living with one foot in Hell
Comment from Britain
Understandably distracted by our own little crisis of trust, we have perhaps not taken in the apocalyptic import of a bigger one across the Irish Sea.
Perhaps it is a vague sense that we knew it all; perhaps reluctance to engage with the horrid details of the Ryan report into child abuse by Irish clerics. Perhaps some think it is old history, a 1950s horror. Maybe there is even a decorous sense that - as a new Archbishop of Westminster is enthroned here - it is tasteless to dwell on the wickedness deliberately concealed by his Church right into the 1990s. Or maybe our own child protection system now looks so shaky that we cannot bear to contemplate the toothless, deferential Irish respect for the priesthood that enabled thousands of children to be starved, raped, enslaved and beaten even as Ireland moved into its tiger economy in the new Europe.
But don't look away. There are wider lessons. Ireland is at least looking squarely at it now, and trying to understand how history twisted its public values into obeisance to unanswerable clergy, so that cruelty and child rape became endemic. It was not only in orphanages and schools but in parishes where families dared not protest. For it was the courageous Colm O'Gorman who helped to prise this all open, when he spoke of his repeated rape, at 14, by Father Sean Fortune in his home village. He successfully sued the Church and challenged the Pope (whose nuncio hid behind "diplomatic immunity").
The victim was accused by the Vatican of being part of a conspiracy; "Canon Law" defences were invoked and the first report - the Ferns report - ignored. "How can it be," asks Mr O'Gorman, "that a church hierarchy who comment on a children's film [Harry Potter] can fail to comment on a report, commissioned by this State, that found Rome culpable in the rape and abuse of Irish children?"
Now the wider, more terrifying Ryan report has met with almost equal evasion and the Church - which raked in millions from government subsidy over decades - has even managed to slough off most of its financial responsibility.
I am not exaggerating; rather the contrary. The Ryan report, merciless and forensic, finds the crimes "systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary". It speaks of the deliberate protection of priests and religious by their hierarchy; of inspectors and police backing off respectfully and senior clergy refusing to help the inquiry. It says that the order that housed the worst sadists, the Christian Brothers, made only a "guarded, conditional and unclear" apology, and cut a deal that no individuals should be named.
The children's own testimonies are too harrowing to repeat: beaten, stripped, humiliated, hung from windows. Some got pregnant, some killed themselves. Sexual attack came not only from their keepers but visiting functionaries; one little boy who spoke of being assaulted by an ambulance driver was beaten by the nuns "to get the evil out of him".
Enough. There is no defence, the evidence is overwhelming. It was a sickness of cruelty, exploitation, official cowardice and inward-looking hypocrisy traceable all the way to the Vatican. Catholicism has not been cleaned up, only lightly dusted. Some Irish dioceses have become properly robust, and Cardinal Se n Brady, the Primate of All Ireland, speaks of being "deeply ashamed"; but I do not notice him pointing his condemnation upwards or rejecting the culture of hierarchy and obedience, anonymity and deniability.
Our own new Archbishop, Vincent Nichols, expressed due horror, but then enraged survivors by praising the "courage" of clergy "who have to face these facts from their past". Incredibly, in an interview on Five Live, he also observed: "it is a tough road to take, to face up to our own weaknesses. That is certainly true of anyone who's deceived themselves that all they've been doing is taking a bit of comfort from children."
Weakness? Comfort? God save us! It gives an insight into why the Church, quick to absolve, blithely moved known abusers on to fresh fields and fresh victims.
"They had their own laws that were written to ensure they were never in the wrong" says Mr O'Gorman, simply. And they covered their backs: when the former Archbishop of Dublin was told that he could be liable if abusers were returned to parishes, he did not prevent this happening. He just took out an insurance policy against financial losses from such claims.
It has been an Irish disaster, but has lessons for us all about the perils of respectful naivety. Archbishop Nichols, after his predecessor moved a paedophile priest to Gatwick, where he offended again, said that little was known about paedophilia then; well, he still knows little if he can talk about men "taking a bit of comfort from children".
This is pure celibate silliness: we are not talking about cuddles here, but rape. I grew up with the Catholic doctrine of forgiveness of sins, I know the territory: but to forgive your own team and ignore their victims is not holy. It is corrupt.
When good people are smug and bad ones are slippery, great evils grow. When any institution slaps on a self-approving label - whether it is "Holy Catholic Apostolic" or like our MP's, "Honourable" - and uses it to defy cynical inspection, the weak will suffer. What seems not to be fully understood by the hierarchy is how much damage this has done.
It gives me no pleasure to say so: I was raised a Catholic, and know what high ideals of gentleness it expresses, and how beautifully.
I learnt at 12 years old not to believe in the automatic holiness of the religious, in a South African convent where nuns hit us and spoke contemptuously of "kaffirs". I then learnt not to condemn the lot, when I moved back to a kindly, intellectual English convent where they honestly tried to live the holy dream. I have always been able to believe the tales of evil without rejecting the whole shebang.
Many Catholic clergy do great good. The remarkable Colm O'Gorman, after decades of struggle, does not reject the ideal either: he says he wept for Father Fortune's suicide and hopes that in afterlife he finds forgiveness.
Now that's holiness for you, and without a smug label round its neck. And until the institutional Catholic Church recognises that, abases itself, pays up, allows whistleblowing and faces the unthinkable, it remains a disgrace. Until it learns humility, it has no hope at all. It is a Church living with one foot in Hell.
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A father is threatening to sue his son's state school for failing to provide a proper academic education. Peter Hills says teenagers are forced to sideline traditional academic subjects in favour of vocational qualifications when choosing GCSE courses. His son Alex, 14, wants to take a full set of academic GCSEs, but his school is making him choose at least one practical course in either Information and Communication Technology (ICT), art or drama. This must take the place of one of his four preferred options: history, geography, French and music.
Mr Hills has written to Children's Secretary Ed Balls to complain that his son faces almost a day a week studying for a qualification in which he has no interest. The transport company director, who lives in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, with his wife Nicky, believes he will be forced to pay for private education for Alex instead - and is consulting solicitors about suing the school for part of the cost.
Alex studies at nearby Eastwood School, which specialises in performing arts and sport. Pupils studying GCSEs there must choose one vocational course - a BTEC in art, a BTEC in performing arts or an OCR National in ICT. This counts as one subject choice, in addition to the compulsory core subjects of English, maths, science and RE. However, it is taught for four periods a week instead of the two allocated to other options.
Mr Hills wrote: 'While I am aware that The Eastwood School has a leaning towards the performing arts and sports, it is surely required to make an equal effort in providing a full academic education for those that require it.
He said the school's specialisms 'appear to be given prominence over all academic subjects, ie history, geography and languages, which surely should be the cornerstone of education in this country'. He added: 'If this matter cannot be resolved, then I feel I will have no option other than to send my child to a private school willing to provide the education best suited to his abilities, and to recover part of the cost from The Eastwood School via the county court.'
Mr Hills said: 'We have sought legal advice to see whether or not it is possible to obtain redress. It is at an early stage. 'What the state is providing, in my opinion and that of just about everyone else I have spoken to, is not suitable.'
The Education Act 2002 says that schools have a legal duty to offer all 14 to 16-year- olds suitable learning challenges and a broad curriculum - including entitlements to study the arts, humanities and languages. Lawyers for Mr Hills are likely to consider if Eastwood School has properly fulfilled these duties.
He said he was very doubtful about the ICT qualification Alex would probably end up taking. He believes the subject matter will soon be obsolete. Ofsted urged the Government to 'evaluate the degree of challenge' the qualification poses, in a report this year. It noted that two major ICT courses, one of which is understood to be the OCR National, count as four GCSEs in school league tables but typically take half the time to teach. 'Students were able to meet the criteria, whether or not they had understood what they had done,' the report said.
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Half-witted British doctor says climate change is the cholera of our era
See below. He of all people should know that cold (as in winter) kills a lot more people than warmth (as in summer). He should be celebrating warming if it were public health that concerned him. But Professor Sir Muir Gray is obviously an establishment figure who is just doing his best to uphold establishment beliefs. He didn't get a knighthood for rocking the boat
In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era - fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution. And just as doctors led the Victorian campaign, so the medical profession should be in the vanguard of this new revolution in public health.
The front page of The Lancet of May 16 says it all: "Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century." This prestigious journal, which usually gives no more than ten pages to vitally important clinical research, made space for a 39-page report.
Climate change will hit the poorest nations hardest, but it will affect us too. In the summer of 2003, la canicule, an unexpected heatwave, killed 14,000 elderly people in France. Rising temperatures will bring that type of problem to our shores. Our health services will be put under pressure by severe weather and floods. But it is the global effects that will hit us, and especially our children and grandchildren, because of the effect that climate change will have on world food and water supplies; millions of climate refugees will disrupt the borders of even an island nation.
Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate change's threat to health. That proposition will instantly provoke a hostile reaction from the diminishing band of climate-change sceptics. But as a doctor of 40 years' standing who has been involved in running public health services for 30 years, I know that the evidence is good enough to make action, not inaction, the sensible choice. An empirical view of the data shows that delay will not just increase the amount of preventable harm, it may take us past a point of no return.
So the medical profession must accept responsibility in the campaign for change. However, with a few notable exceptions, doctors are effectively silent on the health threat that will come to define our age. My fellow doctors cannot just leave this issue to their leaders, to the presidents of the Royal Colleges and to the members of the Climate and Health Council. They should be active in their local communities, where they are known and respected, using their influence to press for national and international action.
Leaders, no matter how great, must have courage and a mandate to act. What is needed, for instance, is for 20 or 30 MPs to collar Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, as he rushes across the lobby and say: "Three [or more] doctors have been to my surgery in the last month warning me about the concern that they and their patients have about climate change - that's more doctors than have ever come to see me about the NHS or even their pay. They tell me the medical profession is clear what needs to be done."
"Why do I never get letters from doctors about smoking?" an MP asked me when I was the secretary of Action on Smoking and Health. "Why do I get more letters on animal welfare than human health?" Why indeed. The medical profession is too silent, and sometimes too apathetic. Fortunately, many of today's medical students and young doctors have fire in their bellies and are taking to the streets demanding action. Their older colleagues should join them and use their influence. Perhaps, they could try some "collar-and-tie" direct action - those doctors who own shares should be at AGMs demanding that companies clean up their environmental acts.
But the medical profession needs to put its own house in order too. I was in a hospital last month that is doubling its electricity supply "to meet demand", with no thought about the future. Sometimes the NHS is not unlike Dickens's Mrs Jellyby, keen to reform others while her own children were scalded through neglect.
The NHS is gigantic and has a carbon footprint that is nearly one twentieth of the whole UK's footprint - 1.3 million staff each with their own footprint, the drugs bought, the buildings, the transport, the water and the food, too much of it thrown away. Now is the time for the profession to mobilise and show the passion that took them into medical school but is then so often extinguished.
In December in Copenhagen, the vital United Nations Climate Change Conference meets. Unfortunately, British MPs are distracted, so the medical profession has a duty to act to make the politicians focus on it.
A recent summit meeting of leading doctors at the British Medical Association unanimously agreed that the need for action is essential. However, battles are not won in headquarters but by the troops on the front line. So I would like to see 90 per cent of doctors making environmentally friendly personal changes; half of doctors signing the Climate and Health Council pledge; and at least one in 20 doctors lobbying their MPs face-to-face. What more appropriate place than a constituency surgery could there be for a doctor to tell his or her MP that the medical profession thinks that urgent treatment is needed?
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Windfarms a security threat
The body that monitors UK airspace is seeking a solution to the potentially disastrous problem of commercial and military aircraft disappearing in radar blackout zones caused by wind farms. National Air Traffic Services (Nats) has asked Raytheon, the American defence company, to design the world's first system for allowing radar to see through wind farm interference. The cost of the 5 million project is expected to be picked up by the wind energy industry.
Wind farm turbines create a Doppler effect as they turn, which shows up on radar screens. As the area and number of these wind farms has increased, the number of radar blackout zones has also risen. Aircraft passing through the area can disappear in the blackout and air traffic controllers can lose their exact position. The Royal Air Force is concerned that enemy bombers or other aircraft could hide behind interference from offshore wind farms and approach Britain undetected.
A Nats spokesman said: "We have a duty to safeguard our operations, so in the past we have objected to the development of a number of wind farms that threaten aircraft safety. We need a system that can eliminate this problem."
Raytheon has been asked to create a software system that will filter out the wind farm noise from other radar signals. This will effectively allow air traffic controllers to see through the wind farms. The company, which is the largest manufacturer of radar systems in the world, hopes to complete the project by the end of next year. Once completed, it will also be deployed in the Netherlands.
Andy Zogg, vice-president of command and control systems at Raytheon, said: "As the number of wind farms grows, there are more and more of these radar black holes. They show up as clutter on the radar screen and the concern is that aircraft approaching from behind the turbines or flying over them cannot be seen."
Brian Smith, general manager of Raytheon Canada, said: "Our work will be to develop the algorithms that allow us to discriminate between turbines and aircraft. It is called clutter erasure."
The Government has identified wind power as a key to reducing reliance on carbon dioxide producing energy sources. Europe's largest onshore wind farm opened last week at Whitelee in Scotland. The 140 turbines cover an area of 55 square kilometres and are each 110 metres high. The wind farm will generate enough electricity to power 250,000 homes.
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Britain wastes huge sums on windmills while the need for reliable electicity supplies becomes ever more urgent and costly
On a barren hillside outside Glasgow, dozens of wind turbines are spinning in the breeze as Britain's largest onshore wind park starts to generate electricity. With 140 turbines producing enough power to supply tens of thousands of homes, it is among the largest and most vivid symbols of the Government's drive to replace Britain's collection of ageing coal, gas and oil-fired power stations with a cleaner, greener alternative.
But this effort to transform Britain's energy industry, which is being propelled by tough new emissions rules and by the sheer decrepitude of much of the network, does not come cheap and has profound implications for consumers.
The site, at Whitelee on Eaglesham Moor, has cost ScottishPower, its developer, 300 million, but this is a tiny fraction of what will be required to upgrade Britain's power network. According to Ernst & Young, the total cost of doing so and meeting tough targets to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020 will be no less than 233.5 billion. Although some of that burden is likely to be shared with power companies, the figure, divided among the UK's 26million households, implies a total bill of up to 8,977 each - or 598 a year for the next 15 years.
Tony Ward, power and utilities partner at Ernst & Young, said that about half of the total, or 112 billion, will need to be spent building new supplies of renewable energy, including vast new offshore wind parks - each many times the size of Whitelee - as well as biomass-fired power stations, tidal and wave-energy projects.
Britain must also renew almost all of its ageing nuclear power plants, which account for about 20 per cent of the country's electricity supply, a project that is expected to add 38.4 billion to the cost. A further 28 billion or so will have to be poured into the grid to build a transmission network capable of supporting new reactors and remote wind parks sited as far north as the Shetlands and in the North Sea. This excludes the cost of building new coal-fired stations equipped with carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), bolstering the UK's gas storage facilities, new gas-fired power plants and a rollout of "smart meters" in every home and business in the country.
Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, whose company will be at the centre of this effort, said: "It's very clear from the renewables and new nuclear stations being planned that there is going to be a need for a substantial increase in investment to build a modern, 21st-century grid."
He expects National Grid alone to spend up to 5 billion a year from 2012 and he is already drawing up plans for a network of seabed cables feeding renewable electricity from Scotland to consumers in the South, as well as sweeping reinforcements to conventional high-voltage lines that criss-cross the country.
Craig Lowrey, director of markets for EIC, the energy consultancy, said: "These are massive investments - we are talking about potentially the biggest investment programme in Britain's history. But if the Government is serious about meeting its emissions targets, it needs to make people understand the true scale of these costs."
Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish & Southern Energy, Britain's second-largest utility, takes a similar view: "In the long term, the unit price of energy is going to have to go up significantly. We are going to have to produce energy in a greener and more secure way and that will cost money."
Ernst & Young's figures might underestimate the total expense because they do not include regular maintenance costs, Mr Marchant said, suggesting that a figure of 300 billion could be closer to the mark. However, he is optimistic that dramatic improvements in energy efficiency could mean that consumer bills will remain stable or even fall in the long term.
The fear is that in Britain's liberalised energy market this tidal wave of required investment simply will not materialise.
Dr Lowrey believes that, under its current structure - which relies on market forces plus consumer-funded incentives designed to boost investment in renewable energy - the scale of investment needed is unlikely either to meet expectations or to be allocated in the way that the Government or society wants. It is a concern that has been compounded in recent months by a collapse in funding that has accompanied the credit crunch and the plunging value of the pound, forcing up the cost of imported power-generating equipment.
The falling prices of oil, coal and gas have also undermined the economic rationale of many investments in more costly, alternative forms of energy. "There is a need for greater intervention to make this investment a reality," Dr Lowrey said. "We need a guiding hand from government."
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Climate Change Act: Now the world faces its biggest ever bill
One of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to "stop climate change", observes Christopher Booker.
One measure of the fantasy world now inhabited by our sad MPs was the mindless way that they nodded through, last October, by 463 votes to three, by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever to go through Parliament. This was the Climate Change Act, obliging the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to reduce Britain's "carbon emissions" by 2050 to 20 per cent of what they were in 1990 - a target achievable only by shutting down most of the economy.
Such is the zombie state of our MPs that they agreed to this lunatic measure without the Government giving any idea of what this might cost. Only one, Peter Lilley, raised this question, and it was he who, last month, alerted me to the fact that the minister, Ed Miliband, had at last slipped out a figure on his website (without bothering to tell Parliament). The Government's estimate was 404 billion, or 18 billion a year, or 760 per household every year for four decades.
Such figures, produced by a computer model, are, of course, meaningless. But one of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to "stop climate change".
Last week I dined with Professor Bob Carter, a distinguished Australian paleoclimatologist, who has been trying to alert politicians in Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand to the scarcely believable cost of these proposals. He gave me a paper he presented to a committee of New Zealand MPs. China and India, as the price of their participating in the UN's planned "Kyoto Two" deal to be agreed in Copenhagen next December, are demanding that developed countries, including Britain, should pay them 1 per cent of their GDP, totalling up to more than $300 billion every year.
Africa is putting in for a further $267 billion a year. South American countries are demanding hundreds of billions more. In the US, the latest costing of President Obama's "cap and trade" Bill is $1.9 trillion, a yearly cost to each US family of $4,500.
Meanwhile, as Mr Obama's Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, babbles on the BBC's Today programme about how the world's energy needs can be met by wind and solar power (for which, he assured us, we would need to cover only 5 per cent of the planet's deserts with solar panels), a study shows that for every job created in Spain's "alternative energy industry" since 2000, 2.2 others have been lost. (Mr Obama talks about creating "five million green jobs" in the US.)
Last week the BBC and various newspapers excitably greeted the opening by Alex Salmond of Whitelee, "Europe's largest onshore wind farm", 140 giant 2.3 megawatt turbines covering 30 square miles of moorland south-east of Glasgow. It was happily reported that these would "generate" 322MW of electricity, "enough to power every home in Glasgow". They won't, of course, do anything of the kind. Due to the vagaries of the wind, this colossal enterprise will produce only 80MW on average, a quarter of its capacity and barely enough to keep half Glasgow's lights on.
It really is time people stopped recycling the thoroughly bogus propaganda claims of the wind industry in this way. Any journalist who still falls for these lies by confusing turbines' "capacity" with their actual output is either thoroughly stupid or dishonest. The truth is that the 80MW average output of "Europe's largest wind farm" is only a fraction of that of any conventional power station, at twice the cost. For this derisory amount of power, the hidden subsidy to Whitelee over its 25-year life will, on current figures, be 1 billion, paid by all of us through our electricity bills.
Truly, our world has gone off its head, and no one seems to notice - not least those wretched MPs who allow all this to happen without having the faintest idea what is going on.
On May 15, the Guardian's famed environmental crusader George Monbiot triumphantly posted on his blog an item headed "How to disprove Christopher Booker in 26 seconds". This was the time, he claimed, it took him to discover how the figures that I had reported on the melting of Arctic ice were wrong.
Guardian groupies piled in to congratulate him, calling for my editor to sack me. Then one or two suggested he should look again at what I wrote. Three hours later, a disclaimer appeared at the top of his blog: "Whoops - looks like I've boobed. Sorry folks". The Great Moonbat conceded that he had been looking at the wrong figures. Still, it was good of him to admit it - and at least his blog ended up with an impressive 514 comments.
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Absurd British immigration clearance procedures
"Tougher" rules have been accompanied by much more lax enforcement. The letter below from a recently retired British immigration official appeared in "The Times" so may attract some attention
I worked at the immigration coalface for 38 years, including spending a number of spells as an entry clearance officer abroad. Your recent reports (May 21) echo the concerns of many recently retired immigration service personnel and many still within the ranks of the UK Border Agency.
The new points system for visa applications, brought about because of an insistence in drastically cutting costs to the detriment of security and a fair and firm immigration process, has devastated the visa officer network that had successfully operated for many years. Whereas previously most visa/entry clearance officers were UK-based, highly trained immigration service or Foreign Office staff, well versed in ferreting out the obvious and at times the not so obvious bogus student, now most applications are now dealt with on a "tick box" system, rather than by personal interview. More and more visa officers are locally engaged staff who are not British citizens and in many cases have never even visited Britain. To leave the security of this country and the implementation of UK government immigration policy in their hands is ridiculous.
In Mumbai some years ago I interviewed a young Indian student coming to study a fairly high level IT course; his papers were in order as were the arrangements for finance. Asked what he used the mouse for on a computer he said he did not leave his computer on the floor so a mouse would not get near it! A few more questions revealed he had absolutely no knowledge of IT and his visa application was refused. Would the current system have revealed this? Of course not. Furthermore, immigration officers at UK ports of entry are now actively discouraged from interviewing visa holders on arrival as this is considered too time consuming and not a good use of resources; "no second bite of the cherry" being the common mantra. This despite the knowledge that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of bogus students arriving annually.
If the Government is serious in its wish to have an effective visa and border control system, then financial consideration must not be its highest priority.
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Fewer taking history GCSE as British pupils abandon traditional subjects
Fewer teenagers are taking GCSEs in history as pupils abandon traditional subjects in favour of new-style skills classes, according to research
Ofsted, the education watchdog, says pupils' knowledge of history - including the Second World War - is 'often very patchy'. Less than a third of students sat history exams last summer - the second-lowest number since Labour came to power. The disclosure - in figures published by the Conservatives - comes amid claims that mainstays of the curriculum are increasingly being marginalised in state schools.
More students have been put onto vocational courses in subjects such as ICT (information and communication technology) - which often count for as many as four GCSEs - to boost schools' positions in national league tables. Last September, the Government also introduced new diploma qualifications in five practical areas, including health, engineering and media, to rival GCSEs and A-levels.
The Conservatives claim entries for traditional subjects are increasingly being dominated by students from private and grammar schools, undermining the chances of comprehensive school pupils getting into top universities. According to Tory figures, 35.4 per cent of 15 and 16-year-olds took a GCSE in history when Labour came to power in 1997. Some 379,280 teenagers missed out on studying the subject, it was revealed. But numbers slumped to a record low in 2007 when only 30.9 per cent of pupils took a history GCSE, meaning 453,679 teenagers left school without studying the subject properly. Numbers increased slightly last summer to 31 per cent. The Conservatives claim the overall slump has left many children without a decent grasp of the past.
According to a 2007 report by Ofsted, the education watchdog, pupils' knowledge of history is "often very patchy and specific; they are unable to sufficiently link discrete historical events to answer big questions".
Michael Gove, the Tory shadow schools secretary, said: "The number of children studying history beyond fourteen has fallen to less than one pupil in three. The Government's league tables encourage schools to push pupils away from harder subjects, even if they are of more long term value."
The Tories also criticised the Government's new primary school curriculum, which was published last month, claiming it would "further water down history" for the youngest pupils. Under plans, traditional subject headings will be removed in place of six broad "areas of learning". History has been merged into new "historical, geographical and social understanding" lessons, which also include a focus on sustainability, climate change, recycling, human rights and a requirement to learn about the role of local authority councillors and MPs. "All these reforms take us completely in the wrong direction," said Mr Gove.
A decline in the number of students taking history at school has already been heavily criticised. Last year, one leading examination board threatened to axe its least popular GCSE subjects, including classical civilisation, following a decline in interest. The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance axed its separate Latin and Ancient Greek languages GCSE courses in 2004.
A DCSF spokesperson said: "All pupils must study History up to the age of 14. Students are offered a range of options for GCSE and history remains a popular choice for young people, both at GCSE and A Level. The proportion of GCSE entrants studying history increased in 2008, of which 68 per cent achieved grades A*-C. "What is clear is that throughout their school careers, pupils gain a wide knowledge of British history - from Roman Britain to World War II."
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NHS criticised by Harley Street doctor for 'missing Jade Goody's cancer diagnosis'
A Harley Street consultant who treated Jade Goody has attacked the NHS for allegedly failing to spot her cancer earlier. Jade Goody died in her sleep at home on Mother's Day
Dr Ann Coxon, a doctor introduced to Goody last year was said to be "very angry" over an alleged failure to spot her illness earlier. Dr Coxon will speak in the E4 documentary Jade: As Seen On TV to be broadcast on Thursday night, according to Max Clifford, her publicist.
He said "Her doctor was very upset and very angry with the way the NHS looked after her and failed to diagnose the cancer that was growing for such a long time," he said. Goody, who died on Mother's Day earlier this year, was given a diagnosis of cervical cancer while taking part in the Indian version of Celebrity Big Brother last August.
The mother-of-two and former dental nurse, who was originally from Bermondsey, south London, first came into the public spotlight in 2002 when she appeared in the third series of the Channel 4 reality programme Big Brother.
In an interview in September, Goody said she had no plans to sue the NHS hospital she claimed was late in diagnosing her illness. "They (the hospital) should have actually spotted that there was something wrong a long time ago," she said. "I don't hate them, I'm not angry with them. Sorry - I don't hate them, I don't want to start suing them or stuff like that, because personally I don't think it's morally right to sue an NHS hospital. "All that's gonna do is take more money out of it and then more people are gonna suffer." She added: "I just think: it's not going to get my womb back, it's not going to get my health back. So what's the point?"
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Grow old gracefully to keep dementia at bay
Amusing. Below is a recitation of popular assertions about Alzheimer's. See here for my comments on the "growing old" study that he refers to. As is usual among journalists, he has ignored all the ifs and buts in the study concerned. His recommendations are a house built on sand. Yet the article comes from "The Times", of London, which makes it likely to be widely trusted
Working until you are 70 instead of 65 is one of the ways that you can minimise the risk of brain disease in later life. The Government is rumoured to be considering raising the retirement age to 70 in an attempt to reduce the national debt - plans that will have been given a useful fillip by new research that reveals postponing retirement can delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease.
According to researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, at the Maudsley Hospital, southeast London, every extra year worked delays the onset of dementia by just over a month. So working until you are 70 instead of 65 is likely to give you an extra six Alzheimer-free months. I am not sure that is enough of a benefit to warrant the additional effort, but extending your working life is not the only thing you can do to protect yourself.
One person in 20 over the age of 65 in the UK has some form of dementia. Alzheimer's disease - characterised by a loss of brain cells, shrinkage and protein deposits forming tangles and plaques throughout the brain - may be the most common form, but it is not the only one. Gradual furring up of the arteries supplying the brain accounts for at least 20 per cent of cases and causes similar impairment to Alzheimer's with resulting loss of memory and cognitive ability, disorientation and confusion. And, while there isn't much we can do to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease, there is a lot that can be done to keep our brain and its circulation healthy - and the healthier your brain the less noticeable any deficit is going to be.
Use it or lose it. The brain is often compared to a muscle in that "exercising" it can slow the damage time brings, and challenging yourself mentally every day will help to keep you sharp. The latter can include hobbies, keeping up an active social life, learning new skills, doing crosswords and puzzles and brain-training games and, as the recent research has shown, working for longer.
The brain is made up of around 100 billion nerve cells, each connected to thousands of others through synapses and it is a decrease in this interconnectivity, rather than the loss of brain cells alone, that is responsible for the slowing of mental agility that occurs with advancing years. Challenging the brain is thought to help by maintaining existing synapses and encouraging the formation of new ones...
Check for diabetes. Ask the nurse at your doctor's surgery for a blood test if you suspect diabetes - clues include a great thirst, peeing more than normal, recurring infections such as boils or thrush, lack of energy and blurred vision. Those most at risk include the overweight, anyone with a family history of the condition and those of Asian and Afro-Caribbean origin.
Drink in moderation. While sensible drinking - the equivalent of two or three small glasses of wine on most days for a woman and three to four for a man - can protect against some forms of dementia, heavy drinking has the opposite effect. One recent review suggests that alcohol accounts for at least 10 per cent of all UK dementia cases. You don't have to be middle-aged or elderly to be at risk: there is evidence that heavy drinkers in their thirties and forties already have significant memory impairment.
Eat oily fish. Fresh tuna and tinned salmon, or fish oil capsules, may protect against Alzheimer's disease and improve brain function. The exact mode of this protection is now under investigation, but it is thought that the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oils may slow the formation of plaques - an effect that may be enhanced by fatty acids also seeming to protect the delicate lining of the arteries supplying the brain, thus helping to maintain good blood flow. One American study found that men and women eating at least one portion of fish a week were half as likely to develop Alzheimer's as those who didn't eat any.
But the case is not so strong for another popular brain supplement. It is thought that as many as one person in ten with dementia is now taking ginkgo biloba despite the latest evidence, which suggests that, while the herb may boost blood supply to the brain, this doesn't translate into any significant benefit.
Consider hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Women who take HRT have been shown in a number of studies to be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease later in life. But HRT has no impact on the progression of the disease once a woman develops the condition. Bottom line? It is a useful side benefit, but concerns about Alzheimer's disease on their own are not a strong enough indication to prescribe HRT in women who are not having menopausal symptoms.
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Catholic Church is living with one foot in Hell
Comment from Britain
Understandably distracted by our own little crisis of trust, we have perhaps not taken in the apocalyptic import of a bigger one across the Irish Sea.
Perhaps it is a vague sense that we knew it all; perhaps reluctance to engage with the horrid details of the Ryan report into child abuse by Irish clerics. Perhaps some think it is old history, a 1950s horror. Maybe there is even a decorous sense that - as a new Archbishop of Westminster is enthroned here - it is tasteless to dwell on the wickedness deliberately concealed by his Church right into the 1990s. Or maybe our own child protection system now looks so shaky that we cannot bear to contemplate the toothless, deferential Irish respect for the priesthood that enabled thousands of children to be starved, raped, enslaved and beaten even as Ireland moved into its tiger economy in the new Europe.
But don't look away. There are wider lessons. Ireland is at least looking squarely at it now, and trying to understand how history twisted its public values into obeisance to unanswerable clergy, so that cruelty and child rape became endemic. It was not only in orphanages and schools but in parishes where families dared not protest. For it was the courageous Colm O'Gorman who helped to prise this all open, when he spoke of his repeated rape, at 14, by Father Sean Fortune in his home village. He successfully sued the Church and challenged the Pope (whose nuncio hid behind "diplomatic immunity").
The victim was accused by the Vatican of being part of a conspiracy; "Canon Law" defences were invoked and the first report - the Ferns report - ignored. "How can it be," asks Mr O'Gorman, "that a church hierarchy who comment on a children's film [Harry Potter] can fail to comment on a report, commissioned by this State, that found Rome culpable in the rape and abuse of Irish children?"
Now the wider, more terrifying Ryan report has met with almost equal evasion and the Church - which raked in millions from government subsidy over decades - has even managed to slough off most of its financial responsibility.
I am not exaggerating; rather the contrary. The Ryan report, merciless and forensic, finds the crimes "systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary". It speaks of the deliberate protection of priests and religious by their hierarchy; of inspectors and police backing off respectfully and senior clergy refusing to help the inquiry. It says that the order that housed the worst sadists, the Christian Brothers, made only a "guarded, conditional and unclear" apology, and cut a deal that no individuals should be named.
The children's own testimonies are too harrowing to repeat: beaten, stripped, humiliated, hung from windows. Some got pregnant, some killed themselves. Sexual attack came not only from their keepers but visiting functionaries; one little boy who spoke of being assaulted by an ambulance driver was beaten by the nuns "to get the evil out of him".
Enough. There is no defence, the evidence is overwhelming. It was a sickness of cruelty, exploitation, official cowardice and inward-looking hypocrisy traceable all the way to the Vatican. Catholicism has not been cleaned up, only lightly dusted. Some Irish dioceses have become properly robust, and Cardinal Se n Brady, the Primate of All Ireland, speaks of being "deeply ashamed"; but I do not notice him pointing his condemnation upwards or rejecting the culture of hierarchy and obedience, anonymity and deniability.
Our own new Archbishop, Vincent Nichols, expressed due horror, but then enraged survivors by praising the "courage" of clergy "who have to face these facts from their past". Incredibly, in an interview on Five Live, he also observed: "it is a tough road to take, to face up to our own weaknesses. That is certainly true of anyone who's deceived themselves that all they've been doing is taking a bit of comfort from children."
Weakness? Comfort? God save us! It gives an insight into why the Church, quick to absolve, blithely moved known abusers on to fresh fields and fresh victims.
"They had their own laws that were written to ensure they were never in the wrong" says Mr O'Gorman, simply. And they covered their backs: when the former Archbishop of Dublin was told that he could be liable if abusers were returned to parishes, he did not prevent this happening. He just took out an insurance policy against financial losses from such claims.
It has been an Irish disaster, but has lessons for us all about the perils of respectful naivety. Archbishop Nichols, after his predecessor moved a paedophile priest to Gatwick, where he offended again, said that little was known about paedophilia then; well, he still knows little if he can talk about men "taking a bit of comfort from children".
This is pure celibate silliness: we are not talking about cuddles here, but rape. I grew up with the Catholic doctrine of forgiveness of sins, I know the territory: but to forgive your own team and ignore their victims is not holy. It is corrupt.
When good people are smug and bad ones are slippery, great evils grow. When any institution slaps on a self-approving label - whether it is "Holy Catholic Apostolic" or like our MP's, "Honourable" - and uses it to defy cynical inspection, the weak will suffer. What seems not to be fully understood by the hierarchy is how much damage this has done.
It gives me no pleasure to say so: I was raised a Catholic, and know what high ideals of gentleness it expresses, and how beautifully.
I learnt at 12 years old not to believe in the automatic holiness of the religious, in a South African convent where nuns hit us and spoke contemptuously of "kaffirs". I then learnt not to condemn the lot, when I moved back to a kindly, intellectual English convent where they honestly tried to live the holy dream. I have always been able to believe the tales of evil without rejecting the whole shebang.
Many Catholic clergy do great good. The remarkable Colm O'Gorman, after decades of struggle, does not reject the ideal either: he says he wept for Father Fortune's suicide and hopes that in afterlife he finds forgiveness.
Now that's holiness for you, and without a smug label round its neck. And until the institutional Catholic Church recognises that, abases itself, pays up, allows whistleblowing and faces the unthinkable, it remains a disgrace. Until it learns humility, it has no hope at all. It is a Church living with one foot in Hell.
SOURCE
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
British Hospital worker told she'll be sacked if she keeps wearing crucifix because 'it might spread infection'
A Christian hospital worker is facing the sack for wearing a crucifix - even though it is not on show. Helen Slatter has been ordered by her bosses not to wear the one-inch tall gold cross on a chain round her neck, although they have no objection to her keeping it in her pocket. It means the 43-year-old must choose between her faith and her job as a phlebotomist - collecting blood samples - at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital in Gloucester.
The NHS Trust involved said that the issue was not Miss Slatter's religion, but conforming to a hospital uniform policy. This limits the amount of jewellery which staff are allowed to wear in the hope of reducing the spread of infection. It follows Health Secretary Alan Johnson's announcement of an anti-superbug dress code for all medics last September. This ordered all hospital staff to wear short sleeves and forgo wristwatches and jewellery whenever they are in contact with patients, in an attempt to halt the spread of MRSA and C. difficile.
Yesterday Miss Slatter said: 'I wear a fob watch and a name badge on my uniform, so what difference does a little cross underneath it make? 'I knew about the policy on jewellery, but this is a symbol of my beliefs. Some Muslim women who work here wear headscarfs. It just seems so wrong that I've been put in this horrible situation.'
Miss Slatter said she has worn the cross under her uniform since she started working at the hospital five years ago. She believes a colleague could have reported her after spotting it accidentally slip out earlier this month. She said: 'I've always worn my cross inside my uniform. It means a lot to me. They've told me I can carry it in my pocket but that simply isn't the same. I can't go along with that. 'My faith is important to me but I'm not a Bible-basher, I don't push it on colleagues or other people. 'Now I have to choose between my job and my faith and that's an awful situation to be in.'
Gloucestershire Royal Hospital says the crucifix ban is not down to religion but due to a uniform policy designed to reduce the spread of infection and the possibility of attacks by patients. [So how does a cross under clothes affect that?]
Mother of one Miss Slatter, of Gloucester, was told at a disciplinary meeting on Friday that she will be sent home if she continues to have the chain and crucifix around her neck. She has since signed off sick from work because of stress while she considers her next move.
She worships at St Peter's Catholic Church Gloucester, where the parish priest Canon Bernard Massey is also a chaplain at the hospital. He said: 'There seems to be an inconsistency in the trust's approach. When I visit patients in the hospital I wear a cross myself. 'It could be interpreted by some people that the problem is not that she is wearing it, but what she is wearing. 'I would be unhappy if she was made to take it off. I've been led to believe that some of the science about how a necklace spreads infection is dubious. 'They need to find ways of accommodating the beliefs of individuals with the needs of patients and hospitals, assuming that all these are fair and realistic.'
A spokesman for the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust said: 'The issue is not one of religion. The Trust employs a uniform policy which must be adhered to at all times. 'This policy applies to all staff employed by the Trust who wear a uniform on duty. 'Necklaces and chains present two problems - firstly, they can provide a surface that can harbour and spread infections, and secondly, they present a health and safety issue whereby a patient could grab a necklace or chain and cause harm to the member of staff. 'Jewellery is restricted to one pair of plain and unobtrusive studs in the earlobes only and no facial piercings are permitted, including tongue studs. One plain ring or band is permitted on the ring finger.'
SOURCE
Does having daughters makes fathers more likely to agree with Left-wing views?
The underlying assumption of the British article below is faulty. Women split roughly evenly between Left and Right at election time. Although it is often asserted, Leftism is NOT in fact "feminine". Women can be very practical and such women are by that fact less likely to succumb to Leftist fantasies. I will be very interested to see what the research methods were when the article behind the story below is finally published.
And other facts run contrary to its conclusions. Married people with children lean heavily towards conservative parties. So having ANY childen, male or female, moves you to the Right. And, in general, people with chidren, male or female, will be older and older people too tend to become more conservative than when they were young. It is young unattached females who lean Left. So the known demographic factors that influence political choice have nothing to do with the sex of the children concerned
When she needs a lift or money to buy clothes, a girl will turn the charm on her father. But it seems that a daughter's influence on her dad goes far beyond the odd favour. Research has found that the more girls a man has, the more likely he is to be Left-wing. Daughters have such a profound effect on their fathers that they can switch their political viewpoint, a study suggests.
Compared to men, women are more likely to favour Labour or Liberal policies such as higher taxes to fund provisions like the NHS. They also tend to earn less than men so won't be as hard-hit by higher taxation. As a man fathers more daughters, he will gradually be won round by their more Left-wing viewpoints.
The study, carried out by Professor Andrew Oswald from Warwick University and Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee from York University, also found that a predominance of sons can make a mother more right-wing. The researchers even suggested that well-known Left-wing politicians and personalities owed their beliefs to the high numbers of daughters in the family. The late John Smith, former leader of the Labour party, had three daughters. Similarly Cherie Blair's father Tony Booth, the actor who starred in the BBC's Til Death Us Do Part, who was renowned for being a strong supporter of the Labour Party, had eight daughters
In an unpublished article to be submitted to an economics journal, the researchers wrote: `This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more Left-wing, while having sons, by contrast, makes them more Right-wing.' Professor Oswald said: `As men acquire female children, those men gradually shift their political stance and become more sympathetic to the "female" desire for a larger amount for the public good. `They become more Left-wing. Similarly a mother with sons becomes sympathetic to the "male" case for lower taxes and a smaller supply of public goods.
`Potential feelings are much less independently chosen than people realise. `Children mould their parents. It's so scientifically because it's out of the parents' control whether they have a boy or a girl.' `We document evidence that having daughters leads people to be more sympathetic to Left-wing parties. `Giving birth to sons, by contrast, seems to make people more likely to vote for a right-wing party.'
They found that among parents of with between two to four children who voted for Labour or the Lib Dems, the average number of daughters was higher than average number of sons. The study is backed up by recent findings in America that showed US congressmen were more likely to support gender equality policies if they had daughters.
Sociologist Rebecca Warner from Oregon State University and economist Ebonya Washington from Yale University studied the voting records of the politicians before and after they had children. The authors concluded that parents realise the potential struggles their daughters will face and begin to sympathise with them.
Long before he even became a father, Brad Pitt broke down in tears and spoke of his desire to have daughters. The actor, who was in a relationship with Jennifer Anniston at the time, told a US TV show: `Yes, I have got family on the mind. Jen and I have been working something out. Little girls, they just crush me - they break my heart.' Sylvester Stalone, star of the Rocky films, admitted he altered his career path and chose more emotive roles after the birth of his daughter Sophia in 1996. He said: `The birth of my daughter was a subtle indication of the way I should go. I want to get back to more emotional, character-driven films.'
SOURCE
Climate skepticism heard in N. Ireland Parliament
On Thursday 21 May 2009, at Stormont, Belfast, Dutch scientist Hans Schreuder, who now lives in East Anglia, told the Northern Ireland Climate Change Committee that there is no evidence for global warming or climate change being man-made. Quoting from eminent scientists world-wide, Mr Schreuder dismissed the entire climate alarmist scenario. From his testimony, these quotes:
"[...] the longstanding paradigm says that because of trace gases like CO2, the atmosphere heats the earth. But this isn't true."
"Any and all evidence that has ever been presented to support the idea that carbon dioxide has an effect on global temperatures has been biased, opinionated and based on an agenda that pre-emptively dismissed alternative explanations."
"Computer simulations regard the earth as a flat disk, without North or South Pole, without the Tropics, without clouds and bathed in a 24 hour haze of sunshine. The reality is two icy poles and a tropical equatorial zone, with each and every square metre of our earth receiving an ever varying and different amount of energy from the sun, season to season and day to day. This reality is too difficult to input to a computer. Did you realise that?"
"If carbon dioxide really is such a danger to mankind, as the US Environmental Protection Agency would have us believe, then the upcoming Olympic Games should be cancelled, as well as all other big sporting events, as well as all road transport and all air transport and all coal- and gas-fired powerstations should be shut down. Clearly there is no need for such drastic action and clearly carbon dioxide is not dangerous at all."
"The above makes a mockery of saying that today's level is unprecedented."
"As a further rebuttal of the influence of carbon dioxide over the climate, the alleged IPCC greenhouse effect is a non-existent effect. No greenhouse, whether made from glass, plastic, cardboard or steel will reach a higher inside temperature due to the magic of re-radiated infrared energy. If it did, engineers would have long ago been able to design power stations made from air, mirrors and glass, extracting more energy out of it than was put into it - if only!"
"The periodicity in the data and the unequivocal solar linkage were not even addressed. This is not science. The whole climate change issue is about to fall apart. Heads will roll."
"Any and all schemes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are futile in terms of having an effect on global temperatures or the climate and any and all carbon trading exchanges are a fraudulent exercise amounting to no more than hidden taxation."
Above is a press release from Schreuder [hans@ilovemycarbondioxide.com]. Full presentation here
Comment on the above received by email:
Courtesy of Prof. Ian Plimer, let me offer you another conundrum. The earth is approx 3.5bn years old. For half of this almost unimaginable span of time, its atmosphere was largelydevoid of O2, a statement which is scientifically uncontentious, I believe. O2 now accounts for roughly 21% by volume whilst poor old CO2 languishes at all of 0.03%.
Question - why?
Answer - because the rise of green plants and photosynthesis have sequestered carbon from CO2 and left behind good ole oxygen. Before green plants, was there a runaway greenhouse effect? To be sure, there was not - in fact, repeatedly the opposite, namely glaciation. All very odd, but for the true believer irrelevant!
Stupid bureaucratic rigidity about class sizes in Scotland
Why is having 20 kids in a class good but having 21 is completely impossible??
The head of education at a Scottish local authority who was suspended following a row over whether an 11-year-old girl should be allowed to go to the school of her choice has taken early retirement. Ian Fraser, the corporate director of education and social care with Inverclyde Council, announced his decision yesterday, just over a week after disciplinary action was taken against him.
Mr Fraser's suspension centres on the case of Kirstin Airlie, the only one of a 101-strong intake to Gourock High who was refused entry, despite attending a primary in the catchment area. Inverclyde's policy is to cap pupil numbers in S1 classes to a maximum of 20 and, the council argued, allowing 101 pupils into the first year would mean employing an extra teacher.
In order to decide which pupil was excluded, a ballot was held of all 101 applications, which resulted in Kirstin being told she had to go to Greenock Academy. However, her parents successfully appealed the decision. An independent review of the circumstances surrounding the decisions regarding admissions to Gourock High was then put in place and Mr Fraser was suspended.
Mark Airlie, the father of the schoolgirl, said: "I don't have any animosity towards Ian Fraser himself, but we felt the education department acted in an aggressive way. "What is most important to us is to get to the bottom of what happened with the ballot and whether or not it was engineered."
Last year, the council lost another high-profile placing request battle after a sheriff ruled against them, and there has also been controversy over the introduction of a 33-hour school week, different school holidays and plans to cut the role of attendance officers.
However, others pointed to the fact that many of the significant events and internal procedures central to the case involving Kirstin pre-dated his appointment in 2006. In addition, despite dealing with significant issues of poverty and deprivation, Inverclyde schools have regularly outperformed similar schools in exam performance under Mr Fraser's leadership.
More here
Insane: NHS practices quack medicine but denies patients drugs that do work
There have been several well-controlled studies which show that acupuncture has placebo effects only
Acupuncture is to be made available on the NHS at a cost of ?1.4bn a year despite little scientific evidence that the 'mumbo jumbo' medicine works. The Government's rationing watchdog NICE will also announce on Wednesday that patients can demand other unproven treatments like osteopathy and chiropracty. This is despite the fact that NICE has turned down drugs for people with cancer and dementia, describing them as 'not cost effective'.
Experts have slammed the new ruling as tantamount to the official endorsement of 'mumbo jumbo' medicine which works no better than a placebo. It is the first time the rationing body has backed the use of alternative therapies on the NHS. Their guidance comes just weeks after a large scientific study found that the traditional Chinese practice of acupuncture was no better at relieving pain than simply sticking toothpicks in different parts of the body.
The research, by the Centre for Health Studies, in Seattle, found that 60 per cent of patients given acupuncture for back pain felt better a year after treatment, compared with 40 per cent of those who were not given the treatment. But the trial found that a third group of patients given 'simulated acupuncture' using toothpicks which did not penetrate the skin, was just as effective as when needles were used. Professor David Colquhoun, pharmacologist at University College London, said this indicated that all acupuncture did was create a 'theatrical placebo', which fooled recipients into believing their condition had improved.
He said of the new guidance: 'This is an official endorsement of mumbo jumbo and the implications of that are terrible, for the NHS, and for the taxpayer. 'We will not only be subsidising an industry of acupuncturists and chiropractors, but worse still spending money on standards and regulation of something which I do not believe the evidence supports.'
On Wednesday, NICE will tell GPs to offer patients with back pain courses of complementary therapies costing the NHS at least 400 pounds a time, as an alternative to exercises they can carry out on their own or in class. The draft guidance says up to 10 sessions of acupuncture, worth between 35 and 50 pounds a session, or nine visits to an expert in 'spinal manipulation' - osteopaths, chiropractors and physiotherapists - should be offered.
Four million people consult their GP about back pain every year and if all of them took up acupuncture or chiropracty, it would land the NHS with an annual bill of more than 1.4 billion.
The guidance says anyone whose pain persists for more than six weeks should be given a choice of several treatments, because the evidence of what works best is so uncertain. There were no randomised controlled trials which showed the benefit of exercise, while on complementary therapies the evidence was mixed, with some showing small benefits. Therefore, any decision on which treatment to try should be left with the patient. NICE say that no one should be referred for X rays or MRI scans until other treatments have been tried.
Supporters of acupuncture say it works because needles are inserted into points in the body identified as 'meridians' through which 'energy' flows. But there is no anatomical basis for belief in 'meridians', and acupuncturists cannot state what the 'energy' they claim to be harnessing actually is.
Paul Robin, chairman of the Acupuncture Society, said the therapy worked 'fantastically well' in relieving back pain. He said the mystery about how acupuncture worked made it difficult for trials to demonstrate that its results were not caused by a placebo effect. Mr Robin said: 'There have not really been enough studies into acupuncture. For example, we know that it works even when the needles are not in the right places, which could be because the needles themselves create an endorphin effect, which gives pain relief. 'That doesn't mean acupuncture doesn't work.'
Chiropracty, invented in the late nineteenth century, works on the unscientific principle that diseases are caused by faulty alignment of the bones. Practitioners manipulate the spine in an attempt to relieve pain.
NICE's green light for alternative medicine comes despite the fact that two years ago it turned down drugs for people with moderate Alzheimer's disease, costing just 2.50 a day. It also turned down bowel cancer drugs Avastin and Erbitux. Ian Beaumont, campaigns director of Bowel Cancer UK, said: 'We hope NICE is not funding complementary therapy at the expense of mainstream drugs which have a more proven benefit - but often are not made available to patients on the NHS.'
Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society, said: 'We have consistently stated that NICE's decision to deny people with dementia access to drugs in the moderate stages of the condition is unethical and based on flawed calculations. NICE must tackle these flaws to ensure people with dementia can get access to effective treatments.'
SOURCE
British anti-immigration party attracting more online interest than all other major parties
The British National Party is outperforming the major parties online, according to a new analysis of the far-right strategy in the run up to next month's European elections. Fresh evidence suggests that the BNP is outdoing Labour and the Conservatives in luring visitors to its website, where it outlines policies such as halting immigration, the reintroduction of corporal punishment and the return of the death penalty.
The statistics came as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York urged voters yesterday not to let the ongoing MPs' expenses scandal convince them to vote BNP in June.
Dr Matthew Goodwin of Manchester University and editor of The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain, argues that the BNP is engaged in an "unprecedented" cyber-campaign. Figures from Alexa, which measure the level of traffic to internet sites over the past three months, reveal the BNP is far ahead of the other mainstream parties' websites. The BNP's site is ranked globally as the 46,000th most popular site on the internet.
The Conservatives sit in 165,000th place, the Liberal Democrats are 198,000th leaving Labour way back about 248,000th. The relative popularities are confirmed by Google Trends for websites, which reveals online interest in the BNP persistently spiking ahead of the mainstream parties.
The figures from Alexa also show the BNP registering more traffic than highly publicised political blogs such as Guido Fawkes. They also reveal that once logged on, surfers spend twice the amount of time checking out the BNP's ideas compared to those on the Conservative website - 6.3 minutes a day compared to 2.7 minutes. But the figures don't take account of the fact that Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem blogging and internet sites are far more profuse.
Dr Goodwin argues that the BNP under Nick Griffin is now augmenting grass roots support through the electronic media. For example text messages sent to random numbers seek a small donation to party funds and ask recipients to forward the plea to family and friends. Voters who make inquiries are directed to a party call centre. Dr Goodwin says: "The BNP's shift to an Obama-style online strategy enables it to circumvent the tactics used by other parties to starve it of publicity and also shows up the dangers of that approach."
He concludes that the BNP is "sidestepping a hostile press by delivering its message direct to the desktop". Meanwhile, a leaked BNP "education and training" document circulated among activists and seen by The Independent gives detailed advice to its supporters to exploit "the growing power of cyberspace media".
It warns against linking unofficial blogs with the main party website, promoting "barking mad" conspiracy theories and poor standards of English. It concludes: "We should use such sites to 'bring the horse as close as possible to the water' and once they find that they agree with our policies, hopefully they'll drink."
Dan Hodges of the anti-racist [Trotskyite] group Searchlight said the web traffic figures massively overstated the true level of interest in the far-right party and accused the BNP of massaging the numbers. "On the basis of their web hits they are more popular than all the mainstream parties combined but that is just not the case. It does not reflect the level of support," he said.
SOURCE
Scottish evangelicals vow to hold back cash after pro-homosexual vote
Good to see that some Scottish Presbyterians still believe in the Bible. And in good Scottish fashion, they will keep money in their pockets to make their point. I am pretty sure there is a schism just down the road. Schisms are very Scottish
Traditionalists opposed to the appointment of gay ministers are planning a campaign of non-co-operation with the Kirk establishment, to deny the Church of Scotland hundreds of thousands of pounds in revenue.
The move is in retaliation against Saturday night's vote at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to uphold the decision of Aberdeen Presbytery to appoint the Rev Scott Rennie to Queen's Cross parish church, by 326 vote to 267. There were more than 250 abstentions, leaving Mr Rennie, a divorced father who lives with his male partner, admitting that the issue still had to be discussed further by the Church.
Mr Rennie, 37, who served on the Church of Scotland human sexuality taskforce two years ago, said that there were tens of gay ministers already working in the Church, who were afraid of coming out. "Two gay minsters came to talk [to the taskforce] under anonymity. It's awful that people feel they have to have anonymity before they are free to talk," he said. "There are issues here for the Church. A space has to be found for gay Christians to have their voices heard. You can't have an open debate about sexuality if one party feels it is unsafe to talk."
Evangelical commissioners were aghast at the result of Saturday's vote in support of Mr Rennie's appointment, which followed more than four hours of fierce debate. Many felt that proceedings had been rigged by their highly organised liberal opponents on the first day of the General Assembly, it having been ensured that a scheduled debate on the primacy of heterosexual marriage was held only after Mr Rennie's position was ratified.
That overture (motion) on the sanctity of marriage, proposed by the traditionalist Presbytery of Lochcarron and Skye, will be debated today. Already, a number of counter-motions and amendments have been tabled by liberals which, their opponents fear, could see matters of sexual morality swept under the carpet and considered for a year or more by a Kirk commission, rather than debated on the floor of the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh.
Despite their defeat, evangelical leaders made clear that rather than quit the Church, they intended to fight their corner. They claim that their congregations are among the largest in the Kirk, and simply through the collection plate provide a substantial income stream which can be denied to the church authorities.
The impact of a freeze on collection contributions would be big. A petition against Mr Rennie's appointment gained the signatures of 272 serving parish ministers, among the 964 listed in Scotland. Evangelicals say that their congregations are among the biggest, from a church membership of less than 500,000. The largest congregations can generate more than 100,000 per annum, up to two thirds being paid over to the church authorities.
The evangelical ministers the Rev David Court, of New Restalrig Church, Edinburgh, and the Rev William Philip, of St George's-Tron, Glasgow, gave warning in a joint statement of the battles to come: "The General Assembly has shown itself to be seriously out of touch with its grassroots in the churches. But it should remember that these are the people who have - hitherto, at least - kept a creaking denomination afloat financially. There will be a great deal less willingness to do that from now on," they said.
"People are not obliged to give," added the Rev Richard Buckley, of Forward Together, a leading evangelical organisation. "As far as we are concerned the Church has sent out a wrong message about Christian morality. God has revealed the truth and . . . the Word of God stands for ever."
Dr James Simpson, one of three former Moderators of the Church of Scotland who during the debate spoke up for Mr Rennie's appointment, warned that "some of the bitterest debates in church history begin with the words `Scripture says'." Mr Rennie agreed. "There is no one reading of Scripture that falls from the skies. One of the great myths in the debate about sexuality is that one of the parties believes the Bible and the other does not. It is a caricature," he said. [How could Romans chapter 1 be clearer?]
Mr Rennie's appointment was warmly welcomed by Richard Baker, the Labour MSP for North East Scotland. A spokesman for Alex Salmond said: "The First Minister is pleased that the debate was conducted in good spirit and in an atmosphere of mutual understanding." [Laughable politician speak]
SOURCE
Three cups of tea a day 'can cut heart attack risk by 70%'
And pigs might fly. This is just tea industry puffery and one would have to look individually at the raft of findings referred to. As far as I am aware, howeever, all the human studies are epidemiological and hence incapable of enabling causative inferences. See e.g. here. And one of the studies apparently referred to below was downright dishonest
Drinking three cups of tea a day can ward off heart attacks, a dietician has claimed. The beverage could even have anti-cancer properties, a review of previous research suggests. The link between coronary heart disease and tea has been the subject of a large number of studies.
Dr Carrie Ruxton, a member of the Tea Advisory Panel, analysed some of these, which highlighted the effectiveness of naturally occurring compounds called flavonoids in combating heart attacks. One Finnish study found men who drank more than two cups of tea a day had a 21 per cent reduced chance of stroke. French research showed that women who drank more than three cups a day had a 32 per cent lower risk of blocked arteries.
Dr Ruxton said the research showed at least three cups of tea a day can lower the risk of a heart attack by up to 70 per cent. She said: 'We are not sure of the exact mechanism, but it is thought that tea flavonoids could be involved in controlling inflammation, reducing thrombosis, promoting blood vessel function and helping to limit furring up of the arteries.' The studies found tea may be 'a useful addition to an anti-cancer diet', she added, but further research was needed.
Dr Ruxton said: 'Tea may be a national favourite but it also has health benefits thanks to its high flavonoid content. 'My research shows there is a growing amount of evidence which indicates tea can play a role in helping to combat cardiovascular problems such as heart disease and stroke. 'This area of research is very exciting for the future. We also found solid evidence of tea helping to boost cognitive function and reduce stress, probably related to tea's modest caffeine content. 'Some interesting research on the role of tea flavonoids in helping to combat certain neurological conditions is emerging.' She added: 'Research shows you do not need to drink gallons of tea to get real improvements just three or four cups of tea a day are enough.'
Dr Catherine Hood, another Tea Advisory Panel member, said: 'The scientific community is learning more and more about tea and its health properties. 'Studies show that there are some very powerful ingredients in tea that can play a hugely important role in protecting the body from some serious and potentially fatal conditions. 'A cuppa is a great way to relax or unwind but could also give your health a crucial boost. 'Just a few cups a day have been shown to help and drinking more isn't a problem either as up to eight cups a day have been shown to be fine.'
Tea is the most consumed drink after water with 131,150 tons of tea consumed in the UK in 2006/07. Nearly eight in ten adults drink an average of 2.3 mugs a day.
SOURCE
BritGov is at it again
Trying to criminalize criticism of homsexuality:
A Christian hospital worker is facing the sack for wearing a crucifix - even though it is not on show. Helen Slatter has been ordered by her bosses not to wear the one-inch tall gold cross on a chain round her neck, although they have no objection to her keeping it in her pocket. It means the 43-year-old must choose between her faith and her job as a phlebotomist - collecting blood samples - at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital in Gloucester.
The NHS Trust involved said that the issue was not Miss Slatter's religion, but conforming to a hospital uniform policy. This limits the amount of jewellery which staff are allowed to wear in the hope of reducing the spread of infection. It follows Health Secretary Alan Johnson's announcement of an anti-superbug dress code for all medics last September. This ordered all hospital staff to wear short sleeves and forgo wristwatches and jewellery whenever they are in contact with patients, in an attempt to halt the spread of MRSA and C. difficile.
Yesterday Miss Slatter said: 'I wear a fob watch and a name badge on my uniform, so what difference does a little cross underneath it make? 'I knew about the policy on jewellery, but this is a symbol of my beliefs. Some Muslim women who work here wear headscarfs. It just seems so wrong that I've been put in this horrible situation.'
Miss Slatter said she has worn the cross under her uniform since she started working at the hospital five years ago. She believes a colleague could have reported her after spotting it accidentally slip out earlier this month. She said: 'I've always worn my cross inside my uniform. It means a lot to me. They've told me I can carry it in my pocket but that simply isn't the same. I can't go along with that. 'My faith is important to me but I'm not a Bible-basher, I don't push it on colleagues or other people. 'Now I have to choose between my job and my faith and that's an awful situation to be in.'
Gloucestershire Royal Hospital says the crucifix ban is not down to religion but due to a uniform policy designed to reduce the spread of infection and the possibility of attacks by patients. [So how does a cross under clothes affect that?]
Mother of one Miss Slatter, of Gloucester, was told at a disciplinary meeting on Friday that she will be sent home if she continues to have the chain and crucifix around her neck. She has since signed off sick from work because of stress while she considers her next move.
She worships at St Peter's Catholic Church Gloucester, where the parish priest Canon Bernard Massey is also a chaplain at the hospital. He said: 'There seems to be an inconsistency in the trust's approach. When I visit patients in the hospital I wear a cross myself. 'It could be interpreted by some people that the problem is not that she is wearing it, but what she is wearing. 'I would be unhappy if she was made to take it off. I've been led to believe that some of the science about how a necklace spreads infection is dubious. 'They need to find ways of accommodating the beliefs of individuals with the needs of patients and hospitals, assuming that all these are fair and realistic.'
A spokesman for the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust said: 'The issue is not one of religion. The Trust employs a uniform policy which must be adhered to at all times. 'This policy applies to all staff employed by the Trust who wear a uniform on duty. 'Necklaces and chains present two problems - firstly, they can provide a surface that can harbour and spread infections, and secondly, they present a health and safety issue whereby a patient could grab a necklace or chain and cause harm to the member of staff. 'Jewellery is restricted to one pair of plain and unobtrusive studs in the earlobes only and no facial piercings are permitted, including tongue studs. One plain ring or band is permitted on the ring finger.'
SOURCE
Does having daughters makes fathers more likely to agree with Left-wing views?
The underlying assumption of the British article below is faulty. Women split roughly evenly between Left and Right at election time. Although it is often asserted, Leftism is NOT in fact "feminine". Women can be very practical and such women are by that fact less likely to succumb to Leftist fantasies. I will be very interested to see what the research methods were when the article behind the story below is finally published.
And other facts run contrary to its conclusions. Married people with children lean heavily towards conservative parties. So having ANY childen, male or female, moves you to the Right. And, in general, people with chidren, male or female, will be older and older people too tend to become more conservative than when they were young. It is young unattached females who lean Left. So the known demographic factors that influence political choice have nothing to do with the sex of the children concerned
When she needs a lift or money to buy clothes, a girl will turn the charm on her father. But it seems that a daughter's influence on her dad goes far beyond the odd favour. Research has found that the more girls a man has, the more likely he is to be Left-wing. Daughters have such a profound effect on their fathers that they can switch their political viewpoint, a study suggests.
Compared to men, women are more likely to favour Labour or Liberal policies such as higher taxes to fund provisions like the NHS. They also tend to earn less than men so won't be as hard-hit by higher taxation. As a man fathers more daughters, he will gradually be won round by their more Left-wing viewpoints.
The study, carried out by Professor Andrew Oswald from Warwick University and Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee from York University, also found that a predominance of sons can make a mother more right-wing. The researchers even suggested that well-known Left-wing politicians and personalities owed their beliefs to the high numbers of daughters in the family. The late John Smith, former leader of the Labour party, had three daughters. Similarly Cherie Blair's father Tony Booth, the actor who starred in the BBC's Til Death Us Do Part, who was renowned for being a strong supporter of the Labour Party, had eight daughters
In an unpublished article to be submitted to an economics journal, the researchers wrote: `This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more Left-wing, while having sons, by contrast, makes them more Right-wing.' Professor Oswald said: `As men acquire female children, those men gradually shift their political stance and become more sympathetic to the "female" desire for a larger amount for the public good. `They become more Left-wing. Similarly a mother with sons becomes sympathetic to the "male" case for lower taxes and a smaller supply of public goods.
`Potential feelings are much less independently chosen than people realise. `Children mould their parents. It's so scientifically because it's out of the parents' control whether they have a boy or a girl.' `We document evidence that having daughters leads people to be more sympathetic to Left-wing parties. `Giving birth to sons, by contrast, seems to make people more likely to vote for a right-wing party.'
They found that among parents of with between two to four children who voted for Labour or the Lib Dems, the average number of daughters was higher than average number of sons. The study is backed up by recent findings in America that showed US congressmen were more likely to support gender equality policies if they had daughters.
Sociologist Rebecca Warner from Oregon State University and economist Ebonya Washington from Yale University studied the voting records of the politicians before and after they had children. The authors concluded that parents realise the potential struggles their daughters will face and begin to sympathise with them.
Long before he even became a father, Brad Pitt broke down in tears and spoke of his desire to have daughters. The actor, who was in a relationship with Jennifer Anniston at the time, told a US TV show: `Yes, I have got family on the mind. Jen and I have been working something out. Little girls, they just crush me - they break my heart.' Sylvester Stalone, star of the Rocky films, admitted he altered his career path and chose more emotive roles after the birth of his daughter Sophia in 1996. He said: `The birth of my daughter was a subtle indication of the way I should go. I want to get back to more emotional, character-driven films.'
SOURCE
Climate skepticism heard in N. Ireland Parliament
On Thursday 21 May 2009, at Stormont, Belfast, Dutch scientist Hans Schreuder, who now lives in East Anglia, told the Northern Ireland Climate Change Committee that there is no evidence for global warming or climate change being man-made. Quoting from eminent scientists world-wide, Mr Schreuder dismissed the entire climate alarmist scenario. From his testimony, these quotes:
"[...] the longstanding paradigm says that because of trace gases like CO2, the atmosphere heats the earth. But this isn't true."
"Any and all evidence that has ever been presented to support the idea that carbon dioxide has an effect on global temperatures has been biased, opinionated and based on an agenda that pre-emptively dismissed alternative explanations."
"Computer simulations regard the earth as a flat disk, without North or South Pole, without the Tropics, without clouds and bathed in a 24 hour haze of sunshine. The reality is two icy poles and a tropical equatorial zone, with each and every square metre of our earth receiving an ever varying and different amount of energy from the sun, season to season and day to day. This reality is too difficult to input to a computer. Did you realise that?"
"If carbon dioxide really is such a danger to mankind, as the US Environmental Protection Agency would have us believe, then the upcoming Olympic Games should be cancelled, as well as all other big sporting events, as well as all road transport and all air transport and all coal- and gas-fired powerstations should be shut down. Clearly there is no need for such drastic action and clearly carbon dioxide is not dangerous at all."
"The above makes a mockery of saying that today's level is unprecedented."
"As a further rebuttal of the influence of carbon dioxide over the climate, the alleged IPCC greenhouse effect is a non-existent effect. No greenhouse, whether made from glass, plastic, cardboard or steel will reach a higher inside temperature due to the magic of re-radiated infrared energy. If it did, engineers would have long ago been able to design power stations made from air, mirrors and glass, extracting more energy out of it than was put into it - if only!"
"The periodicity in the data and the unequivocal solar linkage were not even addressed. This is not science. The whole climate change issue is about to fall apart. Heads will roll."
"Any and all schemes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are futile in terms of having an effect on global temperatures or the climate and any and all carbon trading exchanges are a fraudulent exercise amounting to no more than hidden taxation."
Above is a press release from Schreuder [hans@ilovemycarbondioxide.com]. Full presentation here
Comment on the above received by email:
Courtesy of Prof. Ian Plimer, let me offer you another conundrum. The earth is approx 3.5bn years old. For half of this almost unimaginable span of time, its atmosphere was largelydevoid of O2, a statement which is scientifically uncontentious, I believe. O2 now accounts for roughly 21% by volume whilst poor old CO2 languishes at all of 0.03%.
Question - why?
Answer - because the rise of green plants and photosynthesis have sequestered carbon from CO2 and left behind good ole oxygen. Before green plants, was there a runaway greenhouse effect? To be sure, there was not - in fact, repeatedly the opposite, namely glaciation. All very odd, but for the true believer irrelevant!
Stupid bureaucratic rigidity about class sizes in Scotland
Why is having 20 kids in a class good but having 21 is completely impossible??
The head of education at a Scottish local authority who was suspended following a row over whether an 11-year-old girl should be allowed to go to the school of her choice has taken early retirement. Ian Fraser, the corporate director of education and social care with Inverclyde Council, announced his decision yesterday, just over a week after disciplinary action was taken against him.
Mr Fraser's suspension centres on the case of Kirstin Airlie, the only one of a 101-strong intake to Gourock High who was refused entry, despite attending a primary in the catchment area. Inverclyde's policy is to cap pupil numbers in S1 classes to a maximum of 20 and, the council argued, allowing 101 pupils into the first year would mean employing an extra teacher.
In order to decide which pupil was excluded, a ballot was held of all 101 applications, which resulted in Kirstin being told she had to go to Greenock Academy. However, her parents successfully appealed the decision. An independent review of the circumstances surrounding the decisions regarding admissions to Gourock High was then put in place and Mr Fraser was suspended.
Mark Airlie, the father of the schoolgirl, said: "I don't have any animosity towards Ian Fraser himself, but we felt the education department acted in an aggressive way. "What is most important to us is to get to the bottom of what happened with the ballot and whether or not it was engineered."
Last year, the council lost another high-profile placing request battle after a sheriff ruled against them, and there has also been controversy over the introduction of a 33-hour school week, different school holidays and plans to cut the role of attendance officers.
However, others pointed to the fact that many of the significant events and internal procedures central to the case involving Kirstin pre-dated his appointment in 2006. In addition, despite dealing with significant issues of poverty and deprivation, Inverclyde schools have regularly outperformed similar schools in exam performance under Mr Fraser's leadership.
More here
Insane: NHS practices quack medicine but denies patients drugs that do work
There have been several well-controlled studies which show that acupuncture has placebo effects only
Acupuncture is to be made available on the NHS at a cost of ?1.4bn a year despite little scientific evidence that the 'mumbo jumbo' medicine works. The Government's rationing watchdog NICE will also announce on Wednesday that patients can demand other unproven treatments like osteopathy and chiropracty. This is despite the fact that NICE has turned down drugs for people with cancer and dementia, describing them as 'not cost effective'.
Experts have slammed the new ruling as tantamount to the official endorsement of 'mumbo jumbo' medicine which works no better than a placebo. It is the first time the rationing body has backed the use of alternative therapies on the NHS. Their guidance comes just weeks after a large scientific study found that the traditional Chinese practice of acupuncture was no better at relieving pain than simply sticking toothpicks in different parts of the body.
The research, by the Centre for Health Studies, in Seattle, found that 60 per cent of patients given acupuncture for back pain felt better a year after treatment, compared with 40 per cent of those who were not given the treatment. But the trial found that a third group of patients given 'simulated acupuncture' using toothpicks which did not penetrate the skin, was just as effective as when needles were used. Professor David Colquhoun, pharmacologist at University College London, said this indicated that all acupuncture did was create a 'theatrical placebo', which fooled recipients into believing their condition had improved.
He said of the new guidance: 'This is an official endorsement of mumbo jumbo and the implications of that are terrible, for the NHS, and for the taxpayer. 'We will not only be subsidising an industry of acupuncturists and chiropractors, but worse still spending money on standards and regulation of something which I do not believe the evidence supports.'
On Wednesday, NICE will tell GPs to offer patients with back pain courses of complementary therapies costing the NHS at least 400 pounds a time, as an alternative to exercises they can carry out on their own or in class. The draft guidance says up to 10 sessions of acupuncture, worth between 35 and 50 pounds a session, or nine visits to an expert in 'spinal manipulation' - osteopaths, chiropractors and physiotherapists - should be offered.
Four million people consult their GP about back pain every year and if all of them took up acupuncture or chiropracty, it would land the NHS with an annual bill of more than 1.4 billion.
The guidance says anyone whose pain persists for more than six weeks should be given a choice of several treatments, because the evidence of what works best is so uncertain. There were no randomised controlled trials which showed the benefit of exercise, while on complementary therapies the evidence was mixed, with some showing small benefits. Therefore, any decision on which treatment to try should be left with the patient. NICE say that no one should be referred for X rays or MRI scans until other treatments have been tried.
Supporters of acupuncture say it works because needles are inserted into points in the body identified as 'meridians' through which 'energy' flows. But there is no anatomical basis for belief in 'meridians', and acupuncturists cannot state what the 'energy' they claim to be harnessing actually is.
Paul Robin, chairman of the Acupuncture Society, said the therapy worked 'fantastically well' in relieving back pain. He said the mystery about how acupuncture worked made it difficult for trials to demonstrate that its results were not caused by a placebo effect. Mr Robin said: 'There have not really been enough studies into acupuncture. For example, we know that it works even when the needles are not in the right places, which could be because the needles themselves create an endorphin effect, which gives pain relief. 'That doesn't mean acupuncture doesn't work.'
Chiropracty, invented in the late nineteenth century, works on the unscientific principle that diseases are caused by faulty alignment of the bones. Practitioners manipulate the spine in an attempt to relieve pain.
NICE's green light for alternative medicine comes despite the fact that two years ago it turned down drugs for people with moderate Alzheimer's disease, costing just 2.50 a day. It also turned down bowel cancer drugs Avastin and Erbitux. Ian Beaumont, campaigns director of Bowel Cancer UK, said: 'We hope NICE is not funding complementary therapy at the expense of mainstream drugs which have a more proven benefit - but often are not made available to patients on the NHS.'
Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society, said: 'We have consistently stated that NICE's decision to deny people with dementia access to drugs in the moderate stages of the condition is unethical and based on flawed calculations. NICE must tackle these flaws to ensure people with dementia can get access to effective treatments.'
SOURCE
British anti-immigration party attracting more online interest than all other major parties
The British National Party is outperforming the major parties online, according to a new analysis of the far-right strategy in the run up to next month's European elections. Fresh evidence suggests that the BNP is outdoing Labour and the Conservatives in luring visitors to its website, where it outlines policies such as halting immigration, the reintroduction of corporal punishment and the return of the death penalty.
The statistics came as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York urged voters yesterday not to let the ongoing MPs' expenses scandal convince them to vote BNP in June.
Dr Matthew Goodwin of Manchester University and editor of The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain, argues that the BNP is engaged in an "unprecedented" cyber-campaign. Figures from Alexa, which measure the level of traffic to internet sites over the past three months, reveal the BNP is far ahead of the other mainstream parties' websites. The BNP's site is ranked globally as the 46,000th most popular site on the internet.
The Conservatives sit in 165,000th place, the Liberal Democrats are 198,000th leaving Labour way back about 248,000th. The relative popularities are confirmed by Google Trends for websites, which reveals online interest in the BNP persistently spiking ahead of the mainstream parties.
The figures from Alexa also show the BNP registering more traffic than highly publicised political blogs such as Guido Fawkes. They also reveal that once logged on, surfers spend twice the amount of time checking out the BNP's ideas compared to those on the Conservative website - 6.3 minutes a day compared to 2.7 minutes. But the figures don't take account of the fact that Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem blogging and internet sites are far more profuse.
Dr Goodwin argues that the BNP under Nick Griffin is now augmenting grass roots support through the electronic media. For example text messages sent to random numbers seek a small donation to party funds and ask recipients to forward the plea to family and friends. Voters who make inquiries are directed to a party call centre. Dr Goodwin says: "The BNP's shift to an Obama-style online strategy enables it to circumvent the tactics used by other parties to starve it of publicity and also shows up the dangers of that approach."
He concludes that the BNP is "sidestepping a hostile press by delivering its message direct to the desktop". Meanwhile, a leaked BNP "education and training" document circulated among activists and seen by The Independent gives detailed advice to its supporters to exploit "the growing power of cyberspace media".
It warns against linking unofficial blogs with the main party website, promoting "barking mad" conspiracy theories and poor standards of English. It concludes: "We should use such sites to 'bring the horse as close as possible to the water' and once they find that they agree with our policies, hopefully they'll drink."
Dan Hodges of the anti-racist [Trotskyite] group Searchlight said the web traffic figures massively overstated the true level of interest in the far-right party and accused the BNP of massaging the numbers. "On the basis of their web hits they are more popular than all the mainstream parties combined but that is just not the case. It does not reflect the level of support," he said.
SOURCE
Scottish evangelicals vow to hold back cash after pro-homosexual vote
Good to see that some Scottish Presbyterians still believe in the Bible. And in good Scottish fashion, they will keep money in their pockets to make their point. I am pretty sure there is a schism just down the road. Schisms are very Scottish
Traditionalists opposed to the appointment of gay ministers are planning a campaign of non-co-operation with the Kirk establishment, to deny the Church of Scotland hundreds of thousands of pounds in revenue.
The move is in retaliation against Saturday night's vote at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to uphold the decision of Aberdeen Presbytery to appoint the Rev Scott Rennie to Queen's Cross parish church, by 326 vote to 267. There were more than 250 abstentions, leaving Mr Rennie, a divorced father who lives with his male partner, admitting that the issue still had to be discussed further by the Church.
Mr Rennie, 37, who served on the Church of Scotland human sexuality taskforce two years ago, said that there were tens of gay ministers already working in the Church, who were afraid of coming out. "Two gay minsters came to talk [to the taskforce] under anonymity. It's awful that people feel they have to have anonymity before they are free to talk," he said. "There are issues here for the Church. A space has to be found for gay Christians to have their voices heard. You can't have an open debate about sexuality if one party feels it is unsafe to talk."
Evangelical commissioners were aghast at the result of Saturday's vote in support of Mr Rennie's appointment, which followed more than four hours of fierce debate. Many felt that proceedings had been rigged by their highly organised liberal opponents on the first day of the General Assembly, it having been ensured that a scheduled debate on the primacy of heterosexual marriage was held only after Mr Rennie's position was ratified.
That overture (motion) on the sanctity of marriage, proposed by the traditionalist Presbytery of Lochcarron and Skye, will be debated today. Already, a number of counter-motions and amendments have been tabled by liberals which, their opponents fear, could see matters of sexual morality swept under the carpet and considered for a year or more by a Kirk commission, rather than debated on the floor of the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh.
Despite their defeat, evangelical leaders made clear that rather than quit the Church, they intended to fight their corner. They claim that their congregations are among the largest in the Kirk, and simply through the collection plate provide a substantial income stream which can be denied to the church authorities.
The impact of a freeze on collection contributions would be big. A petition against Mr Rennie's appointment gained the signatures of 272 serving parish ministers, among the 964 listed in Scotland. Evangelicals say that their congregations are among the biggest, from a church membership of less than 500,000. The largest congregations can generate more than 100,000 per annum, up to two thirds being paid over to the church authorities.
The evangelical ministers the Rev David Court, of New Restalrig Church, Edinburgh, and the Rev William Philip, of St George's-Tron, Glasgow, gave warning in a joint statement of the battles to come: "The General Assembly has shown itself to be seriously out of touch with its grassroots in the churches. But it should remember that these are the people who have - hitherto, at least - kept a creaking denomination afloat financially. There will be a great deal less willingness to do that from now on," they said.
"People are not obliged to give," added the Rev Richard Buckley, of Forward Together, a leading evangelical organisation. "As far as we are concerned the Church has sent out a wrong message about Christian morality. God has revealed the truth and . . . the Word of God stands for ever."
Dr James Simpson, one of three former Moderators of the Church of Scotland who during the debate spoke up for Mr Rennie's appointment, warned that "some of the bitterest debates in church history begin with the words `Scripture says'." Mr Rennie agreed. "There is no one reading of Scripture that falls from the skies. One of the great myths in the debate about sexuality is that one of the parties believes the Bible and the other does not. It is a caricature," he said. [How could Romans chapter 1 be clearer?]
Mr Rennie's appointment was warmly welcomed by Richard Baker, the Labour MSP for North East Scotland. A spokesman for Alex Salmond said: "The First Minister is pleased that the debate was conducted in good spirit and in an atmosphere of mutual understanding." [Laughable politician speak]
SOURCE
Three cups of tea a day 'can cut heart attack risk by 70%'
And pigs might fly. This is just tea industry puffery and one would have to look individually at the raft of findings referred to. As far as I am aware, howeever, all the human studies are epidemiological and hence incapable of enabling causative inferences. See e.g. here. And one of the studies apparently referred to below was downright dishonest
Drinking three cups of tea a day can ward off heart attacks, a dietician has claimed. The beverage could even have anti-cancer properties, a review of previous research suggests. The link between coronary heart disease and tea has been the subject of a large number of studies.
Dr Carrie Ruxton, a member of the Tea Advisory Panel, analysed some of these, which highlighted the effectiveness of naturally occurring compounds called flavonoids in combating heart attacks. One Finnish study found men who drank more than two cups of tea a day had a 21 per cent reduced chance of stroke. French research showed that women who drank more than three cups a day had a 32 per cent lower risk of blocked arteries.
Dr Ruxton said the research showed at least three cups of tea a day can lower the risk of a heart attack by up to 70 per cent. She said: 'We are not sure of the exact mechanism, but it is thought that tea flavonoids could be involved in controlling inflammation, reducing thrombosis, promoting blood vessel function and helping to limit furring up of the arteries.' The studies found tea may be 'a useful addition to an anti-cancer diet', she added, but further research was needed.
Dr Ruxton said: 'Tea may be a national favourite but it also has health benefits thanks to its high flavonoid content. 'My research shows there is a growing amount of evidence which indicates tea can play a role in helping to combat cardiovascular problems such as heart disease and stroke. 'This area of research is very exciting for the future. We also found solid evidence of tea helping to boost cognitive function and reduce stress, probably related to tea's modest caffeine content. 'Some interesting research on the role of tea flavonoids in helping to combat certain neurological conditions is emerging.' She added: 'Research shows you do not need to drink gallons of tea to get real improvements just three or four cups of tea a day are enough.'
Dr Catherine Hood, another Tea Advisory Panel member, said: 'The scientific community is learning more and more about tea and its health properties. 'Studies show that there are some very powerful ingredients in tea that can play a hugely important role in protecting the body from some serious and potentially fatal conditions. 'A cuppa is a great way to relax or unwind but could also give your health a crucial boost. 'Just a few cups a day have been shown to help and drinking more isn't a problem either as up to eight cups a day have been shown to be fine.'
Tea is the most consumed drink after water with 131,150 tons of tea consumed in the UK in 2006/07. Nearly eight in ten adults drink an average of 2.3 mugs a day.
SOURCE
BritGov is at it again
Trying to criminalize criticism of homsexuality:
"Church of England bishops are on a collision course with the government over its plans to amend the incitement to hatred laws, claiming they will stifle what they believe is legitimate criticism of homosexual lifestyles. In what is being portrayed in some parliamentary quarters as a battle for free speech, a coalition of Anglican bishops, Conservative peers, Labour malcontents and leading crossbenchers have united to block the proposals.
Last year's Criminal Justice and Immigration Act created the criminal offence of "incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation". But a group of peers, led by the Tory Lord Waddington, forced the government to accept an amendment stipulating that people should not be taken to court for stating that homosexual sex is wrong or for trying to persuade gay people to remain celibate. The clause read: "The discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred."
Now a new clause inserted in the Coroners and Justice Bill would see this defence dropped. The majority of the Church of England's bishops are believed to oppose dropping the defence, although there have been dissenters. "Our view is, if it isn't broke don't mend it," a church spokesman said. "This is about freedom of speech and avoiding unnecessary police investigations."
The Lord Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, the Right Rev George Cassidy, told parliament last week "that people should be protected from inflammatory and intimidating behaviour towards them on the basis of their sexual orientation". However, he added: "Our concern is with the potential application of the law to restrict legitimate discussion and expression of opinion about sexual ethics and sexual behaviour."
Christian groups complain the current laws have already resulted in people being investigated for criticising homosexual lifestyles and claim more will be prosecuted if the amendment becomes law. They point to cases such as that of Kwabena Peat, a north London history teacher, who was dismissed for complaining that a staff away day was used to promote homosexual lifestyles...
Source
Monday, May 25, 2009
Overgoverned Britain
We need a real life Howard Beale. Remember him? He was the fictional American television newsreader played by Peter Finch in the film Network. He became so frustrated at the refusal of anyone to listen to reason that he invited viewers to open their windows and yell into the streets: "I am as mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more.''
Let's face it: we are even madder than that; and not simply because we have found out that our MPs - or some of them at any rate - have been siphoning off large sums of our money to subsidise a lifestyle most of us can only dream about. We were already mad; we were just waiting for something to happen on which to vent our anger.
Normally when the British get irritated, we respond with a resigned and embarrassed shrug rather than shout and bellow. We are not like the French who take to the streets at the drop of a hat to chuck cobblestones at the police. But our characteristic mildness as a nation is being tested to destruction by our politicians - whether in national or local government - who have forgotten that if they must interfere in our lives, to do so only when it is absolutely necessary. We have the worst of all worlds - not only are we over-governed; we are badly governed as well.
We are snooped on more than the average North Korean, harried by marauding armies of parking enforcers and wheel-clampers; pestered by health fascists and safety obsessives and shaken by speed humps. If we smoke we are told where to puff; it we drink we are made to feel guilty; if we drive a big car we are pariahs; if we hunt we have been turned into criminals; if we make an "inappropriate" remark we can expect a visit from the police; if we stand up to hooligans we can end up in court.
Innocent people have been put on a DNA database meant for criminals and will stay there for some time even after the European Court of Human Rights said they should come off - which is a bit rich given that this government introduced the Human Rights Act in the first place to wave its progressive credentials around. Our children are all to have their details placed on a database known as ContactPoint because one appalling set of relatives killed a little girl who should have been watched by social services. For the failings of the system, all children have to be considered potentially "at risk".
In addition, we are all to be considered potential suspects in a crime, too. Why else would the government want us to be on an identity register, other than to know where we are all the time? And why should it? I have nothing to hide and I have nothing to fear but I fail to see why that means I should be on a state ID database.
How has all this come about? A clue can be found in the expenses crisis that has engulfed Westminster. MPs have simply not being doing their jobs properly. They are there to hold the Government to account but have allowed a torrent of legislation to pour forth. They have spent too much of their time thinking up ever more imaginative ways to claim their generous allowances. They have given up their primary task.
This Government has brought in more legislation than any of its predecessors. Since 1997, the Home Office alone has introduced 50 Bills, launched more than 100 consultation papers, made at least 350 regulations and created an astonishing 271 new offences. Overall, more than 3,000 new criminal offences have been created by Labour - 1,000 of them punishable by imprisonment.
Here are just a few of the things you could do before 1997 but can't now - many of them, it must be said, forced on us by EU directives, though our government in most cases agreed them.
Smoke in a pub or on a railway platform in the open air in the middle of the countryside, or at a covered bus stop, or in your own car if it is used for work, or in your own house if it is used as an office where outsiders may come.
Own a horse, donkey or Shetland pony without possessing a passport carrying a picture of the animal.
Ride off with a pack of hounds in pursuit of a fox or stag.
Play the piano in a pub without an entertainment licence.
Stage more than 12 events a year at, for instance, a school or church hall at which alcohol may be served without a full licence.
Set off a firework after midnight or be in possession of a firework if aged under 18 at any time other than the period around Bonfire Night and New Year's Eve.
Own a pistol for any purpose, including sport target practice.
Stage a protest of any sort, even if alone, within 1km of the Palace of Westminster, without the authority of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
Fish in the River Esk without authorisation.
Enter the hull of the Titanic without permission from the Secretary of State.
Import into England potatoes which a person knows to be or has reasonable cause to suspect to be Polish potatoes.
Obstruct the work of the Children's Commissioner for Wales.
Imbibe an alcoholic drink on a London Underground train or bus.
Keep a car on your own driveway without tax, even if it not being used, without filling in a form.
Sell a grey squirrel (though you can kill one).
Labour has created new offences at twice the rate of the previous Tory administration, which was bad enough in this regard, and it has done so at an accelerating pace. Now you may support some or all of these new laws. What cannot be denied is that we have had a frenzy of law-making that has changed the character of the nation in a way that many of us neither expected nor wanted - even those who voted Labour (especially those who voted Labour, perhaps).
What is that drives the legislative mania of modern governments? Will any of them really, truly commit themselves to stop frustrating the activities and livelihoods of Her Majesty's law-abiding subjects with unwarranted interference, intrusiveness and incompetence? Have they no sense of history, no philosophical framework within which they can understand the point at which government activity must end and the private citizen begins? They have lost all concept of the impact of excessive law-making on the freedom of the individual.
The expenses crisis has merely brought all this to the surface: resentment against a Government that raised taxes after promising not to and then wasted billions of pounds on failed IT systems and top-heavy administration; incredulity over ministerial claims that crime has fallen when we can see with our own eyes that it hasn't; frustration at the inane regulations, the unjustified use of fines and charges, the bloody-minded parking restrictions, unreasonable European directives, multiculturalist busybodies, and the vast, overpaid and largely useless quangocracy disconnected from the rest of us.
It has all gone on for too long and the people to blame are those who failed to put a stop it: our MPs. That is why we are so angry about duck islands, bath plugs and second-home flipping.
Nadine Dorries yesterday said that the second-home allowance was an entitlement which MPs were encouraged to claim and everyone at Westminster and in the media knew that. She suggested it was unfair to criticise MPs since they were only enhancing an income most people would consider inadequate. Well, the public did not know any of this and this conspiracy against the voter has been busted wide open. We are as mad as hell so shout it out the window. You know you want to.
SOURCE
British academics urged to defend free speech without limits
Thoroughly admirable views but he's pissing into the wind in Britain
The concept of academic freedom is "impoverished" and under threat at a time when the vogue is for arguing that freedom of speech must be limited to protect certain groups. The warning has been issued in advance of an International Academic Freedom Day organised by the campaign group Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF).
The group's founder, Dennis Hayes, argues that "there are no high-profile defenders of 'absolute' free speech and academic freedom". He points out that Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, is "fond of noting that there are limits to free speech" and that the British Library's Taking Liberties exhibition included a section on "Free speech and its limits". "No defence of unqualified free speech comes from where you might, however naively, expect it," he says.
He also suggests that the argument that limits are needed to protect groups from threats by racists, fascists and extremists implies that these groups are vulnerable, a view that amounts to contempt, he says.
Dr Hayes concludes: "Academics have a choice. To become another profession with no 'noble' goals or to accept responsibility to defend free speech and academic freedom and hope to make the ivory tower a beacon for the defence of freedom in wider society."
Dr Hayes made the argument in a special edition of the British Journal of Educational Studies, which will be launched on 20 May at an AFAF seminar chaired by Ann Mroz, editor of Times Higher Education.
The AFAF has declared this date (the birthday of the political philosopher John Stuart Mill) International Academic Freedom Day. It is asking academics and students to hold seminars, discussions and protests on the topic.
SOURCE
Nutty radiation scare in Scotland
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has defended the need for radiation testing at Dalgety Bay beach, following claims the contamination found there could be natural. Monitoring has been carried out on the foreshore for several years and it is widely accepted the heightened radium levels come from the remains of aircraft dials burnt and emptied out after the war.
However, pro-nuclear campaigner Neil Craig (55) believes the paint blamed for the problem is water-soluble and would have dissolved over time. He said, "SEPA are still maintaining this claim to have tested such sub-microscopic particles and proven them to be paint containing radium. "It seems like kicking an argument when it is down to mention that the original radium paint was water- soluble, so that even if a fraction of a gram had been there 64 years ago it would be long gone, Scotland not having a desert climate. "In any case, the fact is that the level of radiation is so much lower than background radiation elsewhere in Scotland. "Yet SEPA are allowed to spend probable millions on such pointless nonsense.
"This is indicative of the way false fears have been used, worldwide, for bureaucratic eco-empire building."
Radium-based luminescent paint was typically made by mixing a radium salt, zinc sulphide and a carrier material such as varnish or lacquer. SEPA claim test results and circumstantial evidence point to the radiation being man-made and the solubility of the paint could have been altered during burning. A spokesperson said, "The radionuclide analysis of particles at Dalgety Bay showed that they contained radium and its associated daughters. "The lack of high concentrations of the higher members of the uranium-238 series is consistent with the radium being of man made origin.
"It is possible that the action of burning of luminised dials can produce a diverse range of chemical forms, each of which has a differing potential for absorption and uptake by man. "This change and resultant variability in the chemical composition caused by burning also affects the solubility, and this could be a reason why the residues of the radium are still being detected after all this time."
Over the years many items have been recovered from the beach, including dials and a vial of active material. Small particles or flakes found there are similar to those described by a former employee who worked where the instruments were made. In March the MoD submitted its action plan to the SEPA after a survey found the radiation could provide a dose higher than safe limits. It was agreed to have additional monitoring and clearer warning signs.
Plans to cover part of the beach with a protective membrane were submitted to Fife Council by the Defence Estates department this week. The blanket will be used for a programme of identification and removal, to establish where particles are coming from.
SOURCE. (H/T Neil Craig).
Top British High Schools boycott `biased' Durham University
The leading university's "affirmative action" entry system handicaps high performers.
I must say that Australian students have it a lot simpler. If you get a high enough mark in your final High School exam you get in wherever you apply and that is that. But each faculty has its own cutoff. You have to get REALLY high marks to get into Medicine, for instance, but the Arts faculty is pretty undemanding. Both my son and I are graduates of the University of Queensland, for instance, which was established in 1909 and does very well in international rankings. But if my son's final High School marks had been a bit low, he would probably have got into one of the newer universities around the place, which have lower cutoff points for student acceptance. Except perhaps for medicine there are no interviews or letters of self-promotion or any of that crap.
SOME of the country's most academic schools are discouraging pupils from applying to popular courses at Durham University in protest at what they see as an admissions system "fixed" against them. The pupils are being told that they are likely to be overlooked for some courses because Durham uses a handicap system, based on mathematical formulae, to favour candidates from schools with poor grades. As a result, candidates from high-performing schools - whether state or independent - are penalised.
Durham, Oxford and Cambridge are among those universities that have adopted formulae that use GCSE results data specially compiled by Ed Balls's Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). The system gives a rating to the GCSE performance of every school in the country which is used to "weight" the scores of university applicants. The thinking is that because candidates from low-scoring schools have outstripped their peers, they deserve more credit than pupils who score a string of A* grades at a school where most pupils do so.
The extra points can be decisive in "tie breakers" for some of Durham's most heavily oversubscribed courses, such as English and history, with more than 20 applicants per place.
Andrew Grant, chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of independent schools and headmaster of St Albans school, Hertfordshire, said he had sympathy with the plight of the university, which has to reject about 3,500 applicants a year predicted to score at least three As at A-level. "None of us has any quarrel with making an allowance for serious disadvantage in individual cases," he said. "What all of us object to is some spurious mathematical formula being applied across the board as if some kind of genuine accuracy is achievable. "The message I and some colleagues are getting from Durham is that however brilliant your students are in English and history, send them somewhere else - we don't want them."
Barnaby Lenon, headmaster of Harrow school, London, said he was warning his brightest pupils they may not get offers for these subjects at Durham "because this year we have had a letter from them saying they are giving preference to pupils from low-achieving schools".
The concern is spreading to the state sector. Martin Post, headmaster of Watford Grammar School for Boys - a comprehensive, despite its name - said the mathematical approach was flawed. "How can you weight a school on the basis of these GCSE results? Do they take into account, for example, vocational courses for which the government often gives the same value as four GCSEs? Bless them, these people in higher education are probably unaware of the wangles that go on to improve league positions."
Universities have been under strong pressure from the government to raise the proportions of students from state schools and deprived families. Use of the formulae is only one of the techniques used.
Durham has said its system was introduced partly in response to a report last year by the National Council for Educational Excellence, which was endorsed by Gordon Brown, Balls and John Denham, the universities secretary.
Sir Martin Harris, the government's director of fair access, said he expected the GCSE points method to spread. "Will it help fairer access if universities bear in mind average performance of the school? . . . I imagine universities will go down that path," he said.
However, Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the methods were "antieducational". He added: "The operation of these formulae is crude and unfair. Universities should be looking for those with the most talent. The country is making a grave mistake."
Other universities using formulae include Cambridge, which uses government data to award variable points based on GCSEs. The university says no candidates win places solely on their modified GCSEs, but that it is "unarguable" that a candidate's grades are affected by the school they attended.
Oxford also uses weighted GCSEs for admissions to medical degrees. On the course, which traditionally had a public school "rugger bugger" image, 50% of a candidate's chances of being shortlisted for an interview depends on GCSE score, marked up if they attend a poorly performing school.
The Durham formula allows each candidate a maximum eight points for GCSEs. An A* scores one, with 0.6 for an A. The score is "modified" with up to 5.5 points to help candidates who have outperformed the average for their school.
Other universities that have requested GCSE figures include Leeds, Manchester, Bristol and Warwick. Some departments at Bristol, including history, give extra points to candidates from poorly performing schools, although the government data are used only for research.
Some sixth formers believe they may have already been hit by formulae or similar methods. Jack Harman, 19, attended King's College school, Wimbledon, a high-performing school in south London. Even though he was predicted to gain three As at A-level, he was rejected by all five British universities to which he applied to read history - Oxford, Edinburgh, York, Warwick and King's College London. He will now study in America instead. His mother Emma Duncan said: "I cannot say the British universities are definitely biased . . . [but] calibrating the children's results with the school record may be one reason Jack was turned down.It is bonkers he does not have a place in a good university here."
Universities said weighted GCSE scores were vital to see a candidate's grades in context. A Durham spokesman said: "For some courses, competition is so fierce our selectors have to make choices between applicants who present themselves with identical credentials. "The DCSF standardisation measurement allows selectors to see how an applicant has performed in relation to their school's average. The results have been used to inform decisions in favour of fee [paying] as well as nonfee paying schools."
A threat to excellence
The government formula used to analyse GCSE results, adopted by Durham and Oxford, is obviously flawed. It is flawed for two reasons. First, because it assumes that all GCSE results signify an equal level of intellectual achievement. They do not. Many state schools enter their pupils for vocational qualifications which, if passed, are said to count as four good GCSE grades. This is a scam and it renders the whole concept of this government formula ridiculous.
Why, moreover, should a girl from a highly performing school who does slightly worse in her GCSE examinations than her peers, achieving, say, eight A grades against a school average of nine, be judged a weaker candidate than the boy from a less successful school who achieves five A grades against a school average of two or three? The latter candidate may be the stronger, but no mechanistic formula is going to establish the fact.
Ministers, rightly, want more bright young people from disadvantaged homes to win places at top universities. They think, wrongly, that this can be achieved by forcing universities to implement admissions policies that discriminate against candidates from independent and highly performing schools.
In fact, of course, the solution lies in the schools disadvantaged children attend. Labour has failed to raise standards in such schools and now wants us to believe that the problem is the elitism of our best universities. Great universities are, by definition, elitist. They are institutions that exist in order to promote academic excellence. That excellence will survive if the best candidates compete with another for the limited places available. Social engineering will destroy it.
SOURCE
Dozens of NHS patients left to repeat surgery after botched work by Swedish doctors
An interesting commentary on the quality of treatment Swedes receive from THEIR socialized medicine system
Dozens of elderly people were left in pain and requiring further surgery after botched work by Scandinavian surgeons brought in to reduce NHS waiting lists, an investigation has found. An audit of hundreds of patients sent to the "flying doctors" for knee operations found that one in three suffered a poor outcome, with one in five cases so bad that the operation needed to be redone.
Lawyers are considering at least six cases involving patients treated at a centre in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, which hired surgeons from Sweden, Denmark and Finland and to cut waiting times for orthopaedic procedures.
The review of their treatment comes amid increasing concern about the risks posed by EU laws which allow medics to work in any member state, without checks on their competence or language skills. Earlier this month, the case emerged of a [black] German doctor who killed a Cambridgeshire pensioner by administering ten times the required dose of painkillers. Dr Daniel Ubani said he was not familiar with diamorphine, a drug commonly used by GPs in this country.
Under an EU directive passed in 2004, doctors can work in any member state without tests of their language skills or clinical competence. Since then, the number of EU doctors registered to work in Britain has risen by 4,000 - an increase of 24 per cent - at a time when the number of UK-trained doctors fell. Meanwhile, the amount of serious disciplinary action taken against European medics by the General Medical Council has doubled.
Last year, 30 were struck off, suspended, given a warning or had conditions imposed on their practice, compared to 15 cases in 2005. But under current rules the GMC is unable to demand information from its counterparts abroad showing whether a doctor has been previously disciplined or struck off in another country.
The Somerset treatment centre, run by Weston Area Health Trust, hired surgeons from Scandinavia in order to cut local waiting lists, and boost the trust's income by attracting patients who faced long delays elsewhere. Patients from Wales were among those encouraged to travel to the centre, despite concerns from local orthopaedic specialists that they could not guarantee the quality of the doctors, who had been contracted from a private company in Sussex.
Now, an audit of more than 200 patients who underwent knee surgery between 2004 and 2006 has revealed that the number of operations which were botched was ten times the national average.
The paper, published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, found that 37 per cent of the knee operations carried out on 224 patients had an unsatisfactory result, with dozens of patients left in pain. Twenty two per cent of the operations to replace knees were so bad that they had to be redone - a rate ten times the normal figure in NHS hospitals - while the review warns that yet more patients might need surgery redone in the future.
Orthopaedic surgeon Stephen Cannon, former president of the British Orthopaedic Association, attacked the Government's use of foreign doctors to fill gaps in locum services, and achieve waiting targets. "These guys were brought in as carpenters," he said. "They didn't see their patients postoperatively. They flew in to do the operations, and the doctors in South Wales were left to pick up the pieces."
South West Strategic Health Authority is due to publish a review of the outcomes at the centre, which is no longer staffed by doctors from Scandinavia. The inquiry, ordered in January 2007, will compare results for all patients sent to the centre with national data on outcomes.
Dr Paul Callaghan, medical director of Scanloc, the recruitment company which provided the surgeons, said it examined their surgical outcomes in their own countries before they were hired, and found results similar to those in this country. "We are a recruitment bureau, and we were not responsible for how the centre was set up. The doctors were experienced knee surgeons who had shown good results when they came to us."
Mr Cannon attacked the legislation giving "equivalence" to medical qualifications from 27 EU member states, despite the fact each country's medical education is tailored to its health care system. "The systems are very different in each country - for example, there are countries like Italy where doctors qualify while barely seeing a patient," he said.
An amendment making it mandatory for countries to share information will be put to the European Parliament next month, but the British Government plans to block the move. Professor Sir Donald Irvine, former president of the GMC said a "gaping hole" had now been revealed in the protection of patients. He criticised the Government for failing either to block the original EU laws which had created dangers to the public, or adapt British regulation systems to ensure more rigorous assessment for every doctor before they were allowed to work.
Sir Donald said: "This is an unsafe system; the holes in it are gaping. The problem is the starting point always seems to be 'What do the lawyers say?' - not 'What is best for patients?'"
The Department of Health said it did not believe the legislation being discussed next month, covering the rights of patients in Europe, was an "appropriate mechanism" to introduce changes making information sharing between regulators mandatory. A spokesman said the Government had no plans to press for changes by any other route, and said a voluntary scheme was already in existence.
SOURCE
Leftists can sure dish it out but can't take criticism back
British Leftist politician (above) threatens to sue critic:
As you can see, the letter that got the Leftist bully fired up was not even abusive, just disgusted: A long way from "Bush=Hitler"
We need a real life Howard Beale. Remember him? He was the fictional American television newsreader played by Peter Finch in the film Network. He became so frustrated at the refusal of anyone to listen to reason that he invited viewers to open their windows and yell into the streets: "I am as mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more.''
Let's face it: we are even madder than that; and not simply because we have found out that our MPs - or some of them at any rate - have been siphoning off large sums of our money to subsidise a lifestyle most of us can only dream about. We were already mad; we were just waiting for something to happen on which to vent our anger.
Normally when the British get irritated, we respond with a resigned and embarrassed shrug rather than shout and bellow. We are not like the French who take to the streets at the drop of a hat to chuck cobblestones at the police. But our characteristic mildness as a nation is being tested to destruction by our politicians - whether in national or local government - who have forgotten that if they must interfere in our lives, to do so only when it is absolutely necessary. We have the worst of all worlds - not only are we over-governed; we are badly governed as well.
We are snooped on more than the average North Korean, harried by marauding armies of parking enforcers and wheel-clampers; pestered by health fascists and safety obsessives and shaken by speed humps. If we smoke we are told where to puff; it we drink we are made to feel guilty; if we drive a big car we are pariahs; if we hunt we have been turned into criminals; if we make an "inappropriate" remark we can expect a visit from the police; if we stand up to hooligans we can end up in court.
Innocent people have been put on a DNA database meant for criminals and will stay there for some time even after the European Court of Human Rights said they should come off - which is a bit rich given that this government introduced the Human Rights Act in the first place to wave its progressive credentials around. Our children are all to have their details placed on a database known as ContactPoint because one appalling set of relatives killed a little girl who should have been watched by social services. For the failings of the system, all children have to be considered potentially "at risk".
In addition, we are all to be considered potential suspects in a crime, too. Why else would the government want us to be on an identity register, other than to know where we are all the time? And why should it? I have nothing to hide and I have nothing to fear but I fail to see why that means I should be on a state ID database.
How has all this come about? A clue can be found in the expenses crisis that has engulfed Westminster. MPs have simply not being doing their jobs properly. They are there to hold the Government to account but have allowed a torrent of legislation to pour forth. They have spent too much of their time thinking up ever more imaginative ways to claim their generous allowances. They have given up their primary task.
This Government has brought in more legislation than any of its predecessors. Since 1997, the Home Office alone has introduced 50 Bills, launched more than 100 consultation papers, made at least 350 regulations and created an astonishing 271 new offences. Overall, more than 3,000 new criminal offences have been created by Labour - 1,000 of them punishable by imprisonment.
Here are just a few of the things you could do before 1997 but can't now - many of them, it must be said, forced on us by EU directives, though our government in most cases agreed them.
Smoke in a pub or on a railway platform in the open air in the middle of the countryside, or at a covered bus stop, or in your own car if it is used for work, or in your own house if it is used as an office where outsiders may come.
Own a horse, donkey or Shetland pony without possessing a passport carrying a picture of the animal.
Ride off with a pack of hounds in pursuit of a fox or stag.
Play the piano in a pub without an entertainment licence.
Stage more than 12 events a year at, for instance, a school or church hall at which alcohol may be served without a full licence.
Set off a firework after midnight or be in possession of a firework if aged under 18 at any time other than the period around Bonfire Night and New Year's Eve.
Own a pistol for any purpose, including sport target practice.
Stage a protest of any sort, even if alone, within 1km of the Palace of Westminster, without the authority of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
Fish in the River Esk without authorisation.
Enter the hull of the Titanic without permission from the Secretary of State.
Import into England potatoes which a person knows to be or has reasonable cause to suspect to be Polish potatoes.
Obstruct the work of the Children's Commissioner for Wales.
Imbibe an alcoholic drink on a London Underground train or bus.
Keep a car on your own driveway without tax, even if it not being used, without filling in a form.
Sell a grey squirrel (though you can kill one).
Labour has created new offences at twice the rate of the previous Tory administration, which was bad enough in this regard, and it has done so at an accelerating pace. Now you may support some or all of these new laws. What cannot be denied is that we have had a frenzy of law-making that has changed the character of the nation in a way that many of us neither expected nor wanted - even those who voted Labour (especially those who voted Labour, perhaps).
What is that drives the legislative mania of modern governments? Will any of them really, truly commit themselves to stop frustrating the activities and livelihoods of Her Majesty's law-abiding subjects with unwarranted interference, intrusiveness and incompetence? Have they no sense of history, no philosophical framework within which they can understand the point at which government activity must end and the private citizen begins? They have lost all concept of the impact of excessive law-making on the freedom of the individual.
The expenses crisis has merely brought all this to the surface: resentment against a Government that raised taxes after promising not to and then wasted billions of pounds on failed IT systems and top-heavy administration; incredulity over ministerial claims that crime has fallen when we can see with our own eyes that it hasn't; frustration at the inane regulations, the unjustified use of fines and charges, the bloody-minded parking restrictions, unreasonable European directives, multiculturalist busybodies, and the vast, overpaid and largely useless quangocracy disconnected from the rest of us.
It has all gone on for too long and the people to blame are those who failed to put a stop it: our MPs. That is why we are so angry about duck islands, bath plugs and second-home flipping.
Nadine Dorries yesterday said that the second-home allowance was an entitlement which MPs were encouraged to claim and everyone at Westminster and in the media knew that. She suggested it was unfair to criticise MPs since they were only enhancing an income most people would consider inadequate. Well, the public did not know any of this and this conspiracy against the voter has been busted wide open. We are as mad as hell so shout it out the window. You know you want to.
SOURCE
British academics urged to defend free speech without limits
Thoroughly admirable views but he's pissing into the wind in Britain
The concept of academic freedom is "impoverished" and under threat at a time when the vogue is for arguing that freedom of speech must be limited to protect certain groups. The warning has been issued in advance of an International Academic Freedom Day organised by the campaign group Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF).
The group's founder, Dennis Hayes, argues that "there are no high-profile defenders of 'absolute' free speech and academic freedom". He points out that Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, is "fond of noting that there are limits to free speech" and that the British Library's Taking Liberties exhibition included a section on "Free speech and its limits". "No defence of unqualified free speech comes from where you might, however naively, expect it," he says.
He also suggests that the argument that limits are needed to protect groups from threats by racists, fascists and extremists implies that these groups are vulnerable, a view that amounts to contempt, he says.
Dr Hayes concludes: "Academics have a choice. To become another profession with no 'noble' goals or to accept responsibility to defend free speech and academic freedom and hope to make the ivory tower a beacon for the defence of freedom in wider society."
Dr Hayes made the argument in a special edition of the British Journal of Educational Studies, which will be launched on 20 May at an AFAF seminar chaired by Ann Mroz, editor of Times Higher Education.
The AFAF has declared this date (the birthday of the political philosopher John Stuart Mill) International Academic Freedom Day. It is asking academics and students to hold seminars, discussions and protests on the topic.
SOURCE
Nutty radiation scare in Scotland
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has defended the need for radiation testing at Dalgety Bay beach, following claims the contamination found there could be natural. Monitoring has been carried out on the foreshore for several years and it is widely accepted the heightened radium levels come from the remains of aircraft dials burnt and emptied out after the war.
However, pro-nuclear campaigner Neil Craig (55) believes the paint blamed for the problem is water-soluble and would have dissolved over time. He said, "SEPA are still maintaining this claim to have tested such sub-microscopic particles and proven them to be paint containing radium. "It seems like kicking an argument when it is down to mention that the original radium paint was water- soluble, so that even if a fraction of a gram had been there 64 years ago it would be long gone, Scotland not having a desert climate. "In any case, the fact is that the level of radiation is so much lower than background radiation elsewhere in Scotland. "Yet SEPA are allowed to spend probable millions on such pointless nonsense.
"This is indicative of the way false fears have been used, worldwide, for bureaucratic eco-empire building."
Radium-based luminescent paint was typically made by mixing a radium salt, zinc sulphide and a carrier material such as varnish or lacquer. SEPA claim test results and circumstantial evidence point to the radiation being man-made and the solubility of the paint could have been altered during burning. A spokesperson said, "The radionuclide analysis of particles at Dalgety Bay showed that they contained radium and its associated daughters. "The lack of high concentrations of the higher members of the uranium-238 series is consistent with the radium being of man made origin.
"It is possible that the action of burning of luminised dials can produce a diverse range of chemical forms, each of which has a differing potential for absorption and uptake by man. "This change and resultant variability in the chemical composition caused by burning also affects the solubility, and this could be a reason why the residues of the radium are still being detected after all this time."
Over the years many items have been recovered from the beach, including dials and a vial of active material. Small particles or flakes found there are similar to those described by a former employee who worked where the instruments were made. In March the MoD submitted its action plan to the SEPA after a survey found the radiation could provide a dose higher than safe limits. It was agreed to have additional monitoring and clearer warning signs.
Plans to cover part of the beach with a protective membrane were submitted to Fife Council by the Defence Estates department this week. The blanket will be used for a programme of identification and removal, to establish where particles are coming from.
SOURCE. (H/T Neil Craig).
Top British High Schools boycott `biased' Durham University
The leading university's "affirmative action" entry system handicaps high performers.
I must say that Australian students have it a lot simpler. If you get a high enough mark in your final High School exam you get in wherever you apply and that is that. But each faculty has its own cutoff. You have to get REALLY high marks to get into Medicine, for instance, but the Arts faculty is pretty undemanding. Both my son and I are graduates of the University of Queensland, for instance, which was established in 1909 and does very well in international rankings. But if my son's final High School marks had been a bit low, he would probably have got into one of the newer universities around the place, which have lower cutoff points for student acceptance. Except perhaps for medicine there are no interviews or letters of self-promotion or any of that crap.
SOME of the country's most academic schools are discouraging pupils from applying to popular courses at Durham University in protest at what they see as an admissions system "fixed" against them. The pupils are being told that they are likely to be overlooked for some courses because Durham uses a handicap system, based on mathematical formulae, to favour candidates from schools with poor grades. As a result, candidates from high-performing schools - whether state or independent - are penalised.
Durham, Oxford and Cambridge are among those universities that have adopted formulae that use GCSE results data specially compiled by Ed Balls's Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). The system gives a rating to the GCSE performance of every school in the country which is used to "weight" the scores of university applicants. The thinking is that because candidates from low-scoring schools have outstripped their peers, they deserve more credit than pupils who score a string of A* grades at a school where most pupils do so.
The extra points can be decisive in "tie breakers" for some of Durham's most heavily oversubscribed courses, such as English and history, with more than 20 applicants per place.
Andrew Grant, chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of independent schools and headmaster of St Albans school, Hertfordshire, said he had sympathy with the plight of the university, which has to reject about 3,500 applicants a year predicted to score at least three As at A-level. "None of us has any quarrel with making an allowance for serious disadvantage in individual cases," he said. "What all of us object to is some spurious mathematical formula being applied across the board as if some kind of genuine accuracy is achievable. "The message I and some colleagues are getting from Durham is that however brilliant your students are in English and history, send them somewhere else - we don't want them."
Barnaby Lenon, headmaster of Harrow school, London, said he was warning his brightest pupils they may not get offers for these subjects at Durham "because this year we have had a letter from them saying they are giving preference to pupils from low-achieving schools".
The concern is spreading to the state sector. Martin Post, headmaster of Watford Grammar School for Boys - a comprehensive, despite its name - said the mathematical approach was flawed. "How can you weight a school on the basis of these GCSE results? Do they take into account, for example, vocational courses for which the government often gives the same value as four GCSEs? Bless them, these people in higher education are probably unaware of the wangles that go on to improve league positions."
Universities have been under strong pressure from the government to raise the proportions of students from state schools and deprived families. Use of the formulae is only one of the techniques used.
Durham has said its system was introduced partly in response to a report last year by the National Council for Educational Excellence, which was endorsed by Gordon Brown, Balls and John Denham, the universities secretary.
Sir Martin Harris, the government's director of fair access, said he expected the GCSE points method to spread. "Will it help fairer access if universities bear in mind average performance of the school? . . . I imagine universities will go down that path," he said.
However, Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the methods were "antieducational". He added: "The operation of these formulae is crude and unfair. Universities should be looking for those with the most talent. The country is making a grave mistake."
Other universities using formulae include Cambridge, which uses government data to award variable points based on GCSEs. The university says no candidates win places solely on their modified GCSEs, but that it is "unarguable" that a candidate's grades are affected by the school they attended.
Oxford also uses weighted GCSEs for admissions to medical degrees. On the course, which traditionally had a public school "rugger bugger" image, 50% of a candidate's chances of being shortlisted for an interview depends on GCSE score, marked up if they attend a poorly performing school.
The Durham formula allows each candidate a maximum eight points for GCSEs. An A* scores one, with 0.6 for an A. The score is "modified" with up to 5.5 points to help candidates who have outperformed the average for their school.
Other universities that have requested GCSE figures include Leeds, Manchester, Bristol and Warwick. Some departments at Bristol, including history, give extra points to candidates from poorly performing schools, although the government data are used only for research.
Some sixth formers believe they may have already been hit by formulae or similar methods. Jack Harman, 19, attended King's College school, Wimbledon, a high-performing school in south London. Even though he was predicted to gain three As at A-level, he was rejected by all five British universities to which he applied to read history - Oxford, Edinburgh, York, Warwick and King's College London. He will now study in America instead. His mother Emma Duncan said: "I cannot say the British universities are definitely biased . . . [but] calibrating the children's results with the school record may be one reason Jack was turned down.It is bonkers he does not have a place in a good university here."
Universities said weighted GCSE scores were vital to see a candidate's grades in context. A Durham spokesman said: "For some courses, competition is so fierce our selectors have to make choices between applicants who present themselves with identical credentials. "The DCSF standardisation measurement allows selectors to see how an applicant has performed in relation to their school's average. The results have been used to inform decisions in favour of fee [paying] as well as nonfee paying schools."
A threat to excellence
The government formula used to analyse GCSE results, adopted by Durham and Oxford, is obviously flawed. It is flawed for two reasons. First, because it assumes that all GCSE results signify an equal level of intellectual achievement. They do not. Many state schools enter their pupils for vocational qualifications which, if passed, are said to count as four good GCSE grades. This is a scam and it renders the whole concept of this government formula ridiculous.
Why, moreover, should a girl from a highly performing school who does slightly worse in her GCSE examinations than her peers, achieving, say, eight A grades against a school average of nine, be judged a weaker candidate than the boy from a less successful school who achieves five A grades against a school average of two or three? The latter candidate may be the stronger, but no mechanistic formula is going to establish the fact.
Ministers, rightly, want more bright young people from disadvantaged homes to win places at top universities. They think, wrongly, that this can be achieved by forcing universities to implement admissions policies that discriminate against candidates from independent and highly performing schools.
In fact, of course, the solution lies in the schools disadvantaged children attend. Labour has failed to raise standards in such schools and now wants us to believe that the problem is the elitism of our best universities. Great universities are, by definition, elitist. They are institutions that exist in order to promote academic excellence. That excellence will survive if the best candidates compete with another for the limited places available. Social engineering will destroy it.
SOURCE
Dozens of NHS patients left to repeat surgery after botched work by Swedish doctors
An interesting commentary on the quality of treatment Swedes receive from THEIR socialized medicine system
Dozens of elderly people were left in pain and requiring further surgery after botched work by Scandinavian surgeons brought in to reduce NHS waiting lists, an investigation has found. An audit of hundreds of patients sent to the "flying doctors" for knee operations found that one in three suffered a poor outcome, with one in five cases so bad that the operation needed to be redone.
Lawyers are considering at least six cases involving patients treated at a centre in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, which hired surgeons from Sweden, Denmark and Finland and to cut waiting times for orthopaedic procedures.
The review of their treatment comes amid increasing concern about the risks posed by EU laws which allow medics to work in any member state, without checks on their competence or language skills. Earlier this month, the case emerged of a [black] German doctor who killed a Cambridgeshire pensioner by administering ten times the required dose of painkillers. Dr Daniel Ubani said he was not familiar with diamorphine, a drug commonly used by GPs in this country.
Under an EU directive passed in 2004, doctors can work in any member state without tests of their language skills or clinical competence. Since then, the number of EU doctors registered to work in Britain has risen by 4,000 - an increase of 24 per cent - at a time when the number of UK-trained doctors fell. Meanwhile, the amount of serious disciplinary action taken against European medics by the General Medical Council has doubled.
Last year, 30 were struck off, suspended, given a warning or had conditions imposed on their practice, compared to 15 cases in 2005. But under current rules the GMC is unable to demand information from its counterparts abroad showing whether a doctor has been previously disciplined or struck off in another country.
The Somerset treatment centre, run by Weston Area Health Trust, hired surgeons from Scandinavia in order to cut local waiting lists, and boost the trust's income by attracting patients who faced long delays elsewhere. Patients from Wales were among those encouraged to travel to the centre, despite concerns from local orthopaedic specialists that they could not guarantee the quality of the doctors, who had been contracted from a private company in Sussex.
Now, an audit of more than 200 patients who underwent knee surgery between 2004 and 2006 has revealed that the number of operations which were botched was ten times the national average.
The paper, published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, found that 37 per cent of the knee operations carried out on 224 patients had an unsatisfactory result, with dozens of patients left in pain. Twenty two per cent of the operations to replace knees were so bad that they had to be redone - a rate ten times the normal figure in NHS hospitals - while the review warns that yet more patients might need surgery redone in the future.
Orthopaedic surgeon Stephen Cannon, former president of the British Orthopaedic Association, attacked the Government's use of foreign doctors to fill gaps in locum services, and achieve waiting targets. "These guys were brought in as carpenters," he said. "They didn't see their patients postoperatively. They flew in to do the operations, and the doctors in South Wales were left to pick up the pieces."
South West Strategic Health Authority is due to publish a review of the outcomes at the centre, which is no longer staffed by doctors from Scandinavia. The inquiry, ordered in January 2007, will compare results for all patients sent to the centre with national data on outcomes.
Dr Paul Callaghan, medical director of Scanloc, the recruitment company which provided the surgeons, said it examined their surgical outcomes in their own countries before they were hired, and found results similar to those in this country. "We are a recruitment bureau, and we were not responsible for how the centre was set up. The doctors were experienced knee surgeons who had shown good results when they came to us."
Mr Cannon attacked the legislation giving "equivalence" to medical qualifications from 27 EU member states, despite the fact each country's medical education is tailored to its health care system. "The systems are very different in each country - for example, there are countries like Italy where doctors qualify while barely seeing a patient," he said.
An amendment making it mandatory for countries to share information will be put to the European Parliament next month, but the British Government plans to block the move. Professor Sir Donald Irvine, former president of the GMC said a "gaping hole" had now been revealed in the protection of patients. He criticised the Government for failing either to block the original EU laws which had created dangers to the public, or adapt British regulation systems to ensure more rigorous assessment for every doctor before they were allowed to work.
Sir Donald said: "This is an unsafe system; the holes in it are gaping. The problem is the starting point always seems to be 'What do the lawyers say?' - not 'What is best for patients?'"
The Department of Health said it did not believe the legislation being discussed next month, covering the rights of patients in Europe, was an "appropriate mechanism" to introduce changes making information sharing between regulators mandatory. A spokesman said the Government had no plans to press for changes by any other route, and said a voluntary scheme was already in existence.
SOURCE
Leftists can sure dish it out but can't take criticism back
British Leftist politician (above) threatens to sue critic:
"A Labour MP was accused of `bullying' yesterday for threatening to sue a 21-year-old student who criticised him for not backing the Gurkhas. Warren Clegg, a member of the Territorial Army [Army reserves], received the threat in a letter from his MP Brian Jenkins.
Mr Jenkins, writing on House of Commons notepaper, said: `You have damaged my good name. It is my intention to seek legal redress unless you able [sic] to prove your allegations or are prepared to fully retract the offending comments and apologise unreservedly.'
In a letter two weeks ago to his local newspaper, Mr Clegg said: `I wrote to Mr Jenkins in support of the Gurkhas; as usual, my opinion as one of his constituents did not warrant a response.' He said Mr Jenkins had `voted to keep the Gurkhas in poverty' by not agreeing to let them settle in the UK.
Source
As you can see, the letter that got the Leftist bully fired up was not even abusive, just disgusted: A long way from "Bush=Hitler"
Sunday, May 24, 2009
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE BBC: THE MAD COW SCARE ALL OVER AGAIN
By David Whitehouse
It is very interesting to see today's story on BBC News Online about BSE/CJD "vCJD carrier risk overestimated.". It is the latest in a long line of similar assessments of the vCJD situation.
After many years of sporadic interest the BSE/vCJD story took off in 1996 after an admission in parliament by the health minister that there was a link between BSE contaminated meat and a new strain of the degenerative vCJD brain disease that had afflicted a handful of people. Initially, few people knew anything definite about the disease and its possible progression and, depending upon assumptions, computer models predicted anything from a small number of people being affected to a large fraction of the population. While such uncertainty existed it was right for journalists to reflect the scientific situation but as I was science correspondent for BBC Radio at the time, I soon began to realise the tension between science and journalism and the changing approach to science within BBC News at the time.
In terms of news the potential for a modern day catastrophic plague is a much 'better' story than the possibility that nothing much more will happen. So whilst the uncertainty persisted that was the story that was emphasised with the appropriate caveats. However, it soon became clear to most scientists at least that a major catastrophe was not in the making. The increase in numbers afflicted, despite the unknown incubation of the disease, was not increasing as some predicted, but that fact was inconvenient to some and did not impinge on our general approach to the story.
In such circumstances I took the view that journalists should stay close to the data and not let the scientific possibilities, however dramatic and 'newsworthy,' obscure what was actually happening, especially when those possibilities rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data. It was not a point of view taken by other arms of the BBC one part of which was repeatedly promoting the same scare story coming out of one institution based on said computer models and predictions. I believed that taking a sober approach was the right one, especially for the BBC, which was looked to for responsible reporting. Wanting to get on air with a story and make an impression with editors and management was one thing, but I took the view that a journalist should not tailor the science to suit ones ambitions, or survival, that way. The political journalist John Sergeant summed it up when he said that there were many journalists who reported what they could get away with rather than what they know.
My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story correctly. But with hindsight I was correct in my approach. To date the total number of people afflicted with BSE/vCJD remains very small. In fact, far smaller than many illnesses that never get a mention in the media, and the scientific doom mongers have moved onto new pastures. But the attitude towards science still remains at the BBC and has been evident in its evangelical, inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse reporting on other scientific issues.
Reporting the consensus about climate change (and we all know about the debate about what is a consensus in the IPCC era) is not synonymous with good science reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded about climate change for many years and they have become at the very least a clich and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a public that doesn't believe them anymore.
Times are changing. New data is emerging, the world refuses to warm in the past decade, the sun becomes quiet, and scientists are beginning to study themselves investigating how entrenched positions become established and whether consensus is a realistic concept. History and science will always correct things in the end. It has done so with vCJD and it is not impossible that the judgement of history and science on current environmental reporting will be the same.
SOURCE
Nearly a quarter of babies born in UK are born to mothers from outside the UK
The number of babies born in England and Wales reached an all-time high last year. There were more than 700,000 births, 100,000 more than when the birthrate hit its lowest in 2001. The birthrate has been pushed up fast in recent years by immigration. Last year nearly a quarter of all babies in England in Wales were born to mothers who were themselves born abroad.
The number of live births in 2008 was 708,708, of which 24 per cent were born to mothers from outside the UK, according to figures from ONS. The figures were released by the Office for National Statistics, which said: 'Fertility rates for 2008 give an average number of 1.95 children for every woman (over their lifetime) in England and Wales, the highest since 1973 when there was an average of two children for every woman.' The number of births, 708,708, was the highest since 1972, when the long postwar baby boom began to fade away.
Migration is a key reason for the rising birthrate. Some 24 per cent of all babies were born to mothers from abroad, up from 23 per cent in 2007 and 14 per cent in 1998. More than 15 per cent of all babies have both a mother and father born outside the UK. In London, more than half of all children are born to foreign-born mothers.
Among women born in Britain, fertility rates are running at a low level - a British-born woman can expect to have 1.6 children in her lifetime. Mothers born outside Britain have a current fertility rate of 2.2 children. The highest fertility rate is among women born in Pakistan and Bangladesh, who can expect to have 4.7 and 3.9 children respectively.
The town with the highest fertility rate was Boston in Lincolnshire, where women can expect 2.81 children in a lifetime. The East of England has attracted high numbers of migrant workers in recent years to agriculture and factories.
High fertility rates among immigrant groups are thought likely to play a central role in pushing up the overall population. Official projections suggest that the UK population will reach 70 million by 2028, and that 70 per cent of the ten million increase will be driven by immigration.
Critics said the figures pointed to future problems for 'social cohesion'. Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank said: 'This shows the impact that mass immigration is having on the demography of the country. 'It is changing the make-up of the population. 'Many of the children now being born will be brought up in a different culture to that of the majority population. 'This suggests there may be issues in the future when the children grow up and make up a high proportion of the population.'
The population also rose as mortality rates in England and Wales fell to the lowest level ever recorded. Last year fewer than 7,000 men and 5,000 women in every million died - a rate that has fallen by 25 per cent for men and 19 per cent for women over the past decade. Nine out of every 20 babies were born outside marriage last year, the ONS figures showed. The proportion of children born to unmarried mothers has passed 45 per cent for the first time, up from 37 per cent in 1997, when Labour came to power.
Labour has been accused of encouraging single parenthood with tax and benefit systems that favour lone mothers over couples. Until 30 years ago only about one baby in every ten was born to an unmarried mother.
SOURCE
Equality? You must be joking! As watchdogs say it's OK to sneer at men (but not women) in adverts
Majority rules? If you take a look around you these days, nothing could be further from the truth. That sacred tenet of democracy, which holds that the view of the greatest number of citizens should prevail is no more. Increasingly, we are ruled by the tyranny of the minority - or rather by the PC thought-police who believe they have a monopoly on public grievance.
How else would you explain an edict from the powerful Advertising Standards Authority that has decreed this week that it is socially acceptable to treat men as mindless sex objects, but a crime to make similar references to women. Let me explain. In one recent advert for the bookmaker Paddy Power, two sexually provocative young ladies in short skirts cosy up to a banker. Hardly sophisticated, for sure. But offensive? The ASA thought so, banning the advert on the grounds that it associated sexual success with stockmarket betting (try telling that to Nick Leeson).
That decision would have made more sense if the ASA hadn't rejected several hundred complaints about an equally idiotic misrepresentation of the sexes in an advert for Oven Pride kitchen cleaner that portrayed men as simpletons who don't know one end of a scouring pad from another. The voice-over says: 'So easy, a man can do it.'
Now, you and I may know that oven-cleaning is by no means an activity that most men would readily volunteer for. But then nor would most women, if we're honest. Which is why I have some sympathy for the 673 people who complained that the ad was sexist - a significant number in ASA terms.
Yet because the ad belittled men rather than women, the protests were overruled on the basis that the advert was 'unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence'.
Talk about double standards! But the horrible truth is, the ASA is right. As a society, we have become so institutionally sexist against men that it is now accepted practice to treat them as second-class citizens. Think of the huge number of TV comedies in which the men are portrayed as underperforming dolts who are vastly inferior to the female characters (Men Behaving Badly being the most notable example).
Think of all those women's magazines that routinely reinforce the stereotype of men as being helpless inadequates who think only with their lower organs.
On a more serious note, think of the raft of legislation that has been put in place to benefit women, and indeed positively discriminate in favour of them, often at the expense of male interests. In the supposed attempt to impose equality across the board there is - often quite literally - one rule for women and another for men. What's equal about that?
Surely the only true test of equality is a simple one. A little gender role reversal will do it. Imagine the same Oven Pride ad with women portrayed as imbeciles incapable of performing a simple domestic task. The firm would be flayed alive as sexist pigs and commercial chauvinists.
So why in 21st-century Britain is it OK to ridicule men but not women? If we believe in satirising gender stereotypes, then everyone should be up for grabs, so to speak.
But then the problem extends much further than the age-old battle of the sexes. It reaches into every arena of public life in which a supposedly weaker group is entitled to mock or denigrate anyone or anything it chooses, but must never, ever be ridiculed or criticised in return. So it's fair game for any paid-up member of the commentariat to belittle heterosexual marriage, but gay partnerships are deemed beyond reproach.
It's culturally acceptable to make jokes about Christians, or openly denigrate their faith, but belittle or insult any minority religion in a similar vein and you will be branded a hateful bigot. It's fine for the bien pensants to sneer at Middle England with its bourgeois values, but should Middle England dare to pass opprobrium on the cultural values of any other group and they are condemned as quasi-fascists.
How can this be right? Surely equality should be a two-way street in which the jokes, the criticisms and the views are allowed to flow freely in both directions without minority lobby groups decreeing what is or isn't acceptable? Alas, I fear it is already too late.
Just look at some of the big news stories of the past few months for a snapshot of the new orthodoxy. In March this year, a large group of Muslims in Luton protested in the town with deeply offensive posters vilifying our returning troops, calling them rapists and murderers. Only two people were arrested that day. No, not any of the Muslim rabble, but two of the decent majority who could not tolerate this abuse against our brave troops and shouted back at the fanatics. They were eventually released without charge.
Or how about the boss of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, David Holmes, who described as 'retarded homophobes' those who believe that heterosexual couples make the most suitable adoptive parents. This, despite the fact that most ordinary families recognise that a child fares best when it has a married mother and father in the home - a belief that is backed by repeated academic studies.
Then there is the way Christians are routinely ignored in our society in a craven attempt to appease minority religions, with crosses banned from public buildings and civic officials reprimanded for daring to mention their faith in public. (Remember the nurse who almost lost her job for making the unforgivable error of praying for a patient?). You'd never imagine we are a country where more than 60 per cent of people still define themselves as Christian.
Can you imagine for a moment a devout Muslim nurse being suspended from the NHS because she prays to save a sick patient? Or a Christian succeeding in complaining about a traditional Muslim festival and having it cancelled - as so often happens each year in schools and town centres at Easter and Christmas. Of course not. Minority rules, OK.
Everywhere you look, double standards have become the order of the day. And the sorry truth is that there is almost no one left either able or willing to stand up for the views of the silent majority, who have been brushed aside by the PC zealots and their endless list of grievances - some real, many imagined.
The great British institutions, whether they be the BBC, the Church of England or Parliament, have been cowed into submission by the cheerleaders for minority rule. In their desperation to cause offence to no one, they no longer know what they stand for any more. Equality? To paraphrase Orwell, some are more equal than others.
SOURCE
Coroner's fury as great-grandfather, 86, dies after being dumped on NHS emergency trolley for 19 hours TWICE
Oh no! NOT a Royal Marine. How disgusting. The neglect below should not happen to anybody but Royal Marines are heroic men who should be treated with special honour
A Normandy veteran died after being abandoned on a hospital trolley for 19 hours - on two separate occasions. Walter Gibson, 86, suffered an agonising death from infected bedsores caused by his ordeal. Yesterday a coroner condemned the 'gross failings' and 'neglect' that contributed to the great-grandfather's death.
Mr Gibson, who had Parkinson's disease, was admitted to Queen's Hospital in Romford, Essex, in December 2007 with a chest infection. But the flagship 200million, three-year-old hospital did not have enough beds to accommodate him, an inquest heard. Instead Mr Gibson was left on an A&E trolley - designed to be used for up to 12 hours - for 19 hours. By the time he returned to his care home after treatment Mr Gibson had developed painful bedsores.
Days later, on New Year's Day 2008, he was admitted to the hospital again with pneumonia. Astonishingly, he was forced to endure another agonising 19 hours on a trolley as he waited for a bed. When Mr Gibson was finally seen by locum consultant physician Dr O A Elegbe, it was clear the bedsores - also called pressure sores - had become far more severe and were infected. One of the sores had developed into a 'grade four' ulcer - deep enough to expose tendon and bone. The wounds were dressed, but it was another 12 hours before he was moved to a ward where he could be placed on a pressure-relieving mattress.
By then, however, it was too late. Mr Gibson died on January 12 of septicaemia as a result of the open bedsores. Bronchial pneumonia was also found to be a contributing factor in his death. Yesterday coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox passed a verdict of death by natural causes, contributed to by neglect.
Dr Wilcox told Walthamstow Coroner's Court in East London: 'It is quite clear from the evidence I've heard that the length of time Mr Gibson waited at A&E both the first and second time - the second time added insult to injury to a man already completely dependent - made a significant contribution to his death.' She added: 'He was at very, very high risk of pressure sores and he should have been provided with appropriate protection against worsening of the pressure sores.'
Mr Gibson's wife Pheobe, 82, lives in a care home in Dagenham. The couple had three daughters, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Mr Gibson served as a Royal Marine during the Second World War and was involved in the D-Day landings.
Two of his daughters, Jacqueline With and Kay Newton, and his granddaughter Vicky Newton were in court to hear the coroner's criticisms of the hospital. Mrs With, 62, said after the inquest: 'We were angry and upset when we found out that the bedsores were a factor in his death, they had got infected and he got septicaemia. 'If he hadn't had to wait so long on the trolley he wouldn't have got the bedsores and may have survived longer.' She added: 'I know hospital A&E is a busy place but I feel the elderly should be fast-tracked through. 'It's a hard task for the doctors and nurses trying to treat people but something needs to be done. More money needs to be put into emergency care or there should be a specialist unit for the elderly.'
The coroner urged Queen's Hospital to increase training for nurses, step up risk assessment of patients likely to develop pressure sores and provide more air mattresses.
Mrs With, of South Ockendon, Essex, said: 'I genuinely hope the recommendations go through so that no one else has to suffer the terrible way my poor dad did.' The Daily Mail's Dignity For The Elderly campaign has highlighted how vulnerable older patients are sometimes not given the care they deserve in hospital.
A spokesman for Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust, which runs Queen's Hospital, said: 'Our sympathies are with Mr Gibson's family at this difficult time. 'Over the past year, the trust, in partnership with the primary care trusts, has reviewed and streamlined the processes for patients attending A&E to ensure that they can be admitted and cared for in the right setting to meet individual needs. 'A list of recommended actions from the coroner will be submitted to the trust for implementation and response. 'The trust takes very seriously what lessons can be learnt in order to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.' [Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t]
SOURCE
By David Whitehouse
It is very interesting to see today's story on BBC News Online about BSE/CJD "vCJD carrier risk overestimated.". It is the latest in a long line of similar assessments of the vCJD situation.
After many years of sporadic interest the BSE/vCJD story took off in 1996 after an admission in parliament by the health minister that there was a link between BSE contaminated meat and a new strain of the degenerative vCJD brain disease that had afflicted a handful of people. Initially, few people knew anything definite about the disease and its possible progression and, depending upon assumptions, computer models predicted anything from a small number of people being affected to a large fraction of the population. While such uncertainty existed it was right for journalists to reflect the scientific situation but as I was science correspondent for BBC Radio at the time, I soon began to realise the tension between science and journalism and the changing approach to science within BBC News at the time.
In terms of news the potential for a modern day catastrophic plague is a much 'better' story than the possibility that nothing much more will happen. So whilst the uncertainty persisted that was the story that was emphasised with the appropriate caveats. However, it soon became clear to most scientists at least that a major catastrophe was not in the making. The increase in numbers afflicted, despite the unknown incubation of the disease, was not increasing as some predicted, but that fact was inconvenient to some and did not impinge on our general approach to the story.
In such circumstances I took the view that journalists should stay close to the data and not let the scientific possibilities, however dramatic and 'newsworthy,' obscure what was actually happening, especially when those possibilities rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data. It was not a point of view taken by other arms of the BBC one part of which was repeatedly promoting the same scare story coming out of one institution based on said computer models and predictions. I believed that taking a sober approach was the right one, especially for the BBC, which was looked to for responsible reporting. Wanting to get on air with a story and make an impression with editors and management was one thing, but I took the view that a journalist should not tailor the science to suit ones ambitions, or survival, that way. The political journalist John Sergeant summed it up when he said that there were many journalists who reported what they could get away with rather than what they know.
My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story correctly. But with hindsight I was correct in my approach. To date the total number of people afflicted with BSE/vCJD remains very small. In fact, far smaller than many illnesses that never get a mention in the media, and the scientific doom mongers have moved onto new pastures. But the attitude towards science still remains at the BBC and has been evident in its evangelical, inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse reporting on other scientific issues.
Reporting the consensus about climate change (and we all know about the debate about what is a consensus in the IPCC era) is not synonymous with good science reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded about climate change for many years and they have become at the very least a clich and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a public that doesn't believe them anymore.
Times are changing. New data is emerging, the world refuses to warm in the past decade, the sun becomes quiet, and scientists are beginning to study themselves investigating how entrenched positions become established and whether consensus is a realistic concept. History and science will always correct things in the end. It has done so with vCJD and it is not impossible that the judgement of history and science on current environmental reporting will be the same.
SOURCE
Nearly a quarter of babies born in UK are born to mothers from outside the UK
The number of babies born in England and Wales reached an all-time high last year. There were more than 700,000 births, 100,000 more than when the birthrate hit its lowest in 2001. The birthrate has been pushed up fast in recent years by immigration. Last year nearly a quarter of all babies in England in Wales were born to mothers who were themselves born abroad.
The number of live births in 2008 was 708,708, of which 24 per cent were born to mothers from outside the UK, according to figures from ONS. The figures were released by the Office for National Statistics, which said: 'Fertility rates for 2008 give an average number of 1.95 children for every woman (over their lifetime) in England and Wales, the highest since 1973 when there was an average of two children for every woman.' The number of births, 708,708, was the highest since 1972, when the long postwar baby boom began to fade away.
Migration is a key reason for the rising birthrate. Some 24 per cent of all babies were born to mothers from abroad, up from 23 per cent in 2007 and 14 per cent in 1998. More than 15 per cent of all babies have both a mother and father born outside the UK. In London, more than half of all children are born to foreign-born mothers.
Among women born in Britain, fertility rates are running at a low level - a British-born woman can expect to have 1.6 children in her lifetime. Mothers born outside Britain have a current fertility rate of 2.2 children. The highest fertility rate is among women born in Pakistan and Bangladesh, who can expect to have 4.7 and 3.9 children respectively.
The town with the highest fertility rate was Boston in Lincolnshire, where women can expect 2.81 children in a lifetime. The East of England has attracted high numbers of migrant workers in recent years to agriculture and factories.
High fertility rates among immigrant groups are thought likely to play a central role in pushing up the overall population. Official projections suggest that the UK population will reach 70 million by 2028, and that 70 per cent of the ten million increase will be driven by immigration.
Critics said the figures pointed to future problems for 'social cohesion'. Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank said: 'This shows the impact that mass immigration is having on the demography of the country. 'It is changing the make-up of the population. 'Many of the children now being born will be brought up in a different culture to that of the majority population. 'This suggests there may be issues in the future when the children grow up and make up a high proportion of the population.'
The population also rose as mortality rates in England and Wales fell to the lowest level ever recorded. Last year fewer than 7,000 men and 5,000 women in every million died - a rate that has fallen by 25 per cent for men and 19 per cent for women over the past decade. Nine out of every 20 babies were born outside marriage last year, the ONS figures showed. The proportion of children born to unmarried mothers has passed 45 per cent for the first time, up from 37 per cent in 1997, when Labour came to power.
Labour has been accused of encouraging single parenthood with tax and benefit systems that favour lone mothers over couples. Until 30 years ago only about one baby in every ten was born to an unmarried mother.
SOURCE
Equality? You must be joking! As watchdogs say it's OK to sneer at men (but not women) in adverts
Majority rules? If you take a look around you these days, nothing could be further from the truth. That sacred tenet of democracy, which holds that the view of the greatest number of citizens should prevail is no more. Increasingly, we are ruled by the tyranny of the minority - or rather by the PC thought-police who believe they have a monopoly on public grievance.
How else would you explain an edict from the powerful Advertising Standards Authority that has decreed this week that it is socially acceptable to treat men as mindless sex objects, but a crime to make similar references to women. Let me explain. In one recent advert for the bookmaker Paddy Power, two sexually provocative young ladies in short skirts cosy up to a banker. Hardly sophisticated, for sure. But offensive? The ASA thought so, banning the advert on the grounds that it associated sexual success with stockmarket betting (try telling that to Nick Leeson).
That decision would have made more sense if the ASA hadn't rejected several hundred complaints about an equally idiotic misrepresentation of the sexes in an advert for Oven Pride kitchen cleaner that portrayed men as simpletons who don't know one end of a scouring pad from another. The voice-over says: 'So easy, a man can do it.'
Now, you and I may know that oven-cleaning is by no means an activity that most men would readily volunteer for. But then nor would most women, if we're honest. Which is why I have some sympathy for the 673 people who complained that the ad was sexist - a significant number in ASA terms.
Yet because the ad belittled men rather than women, the protests were overruled on the basis that the advert was 'unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence'.
Talk about double standards! But the horrible truth is, the ASA is right. As a society, we have become so institutionally sexist against men that it is now accepted practice to treat them as second-class citizens. Think of the huge number of TV comedies in which the men are portrayed as underperforming dolts who are vastly inferior to the female characters (Men Behaving Badly being the most notable example).
Think of all those women's magazines that routinely reinforce the stereotype of men as being helpless inadequates who think only with their lower organs.
On a more serious note, think of the raft of legislation that has been put in place to benefit women, and indeed positively discriminate in favour of them, often at the expense of male interests. In the supposed attempt to impose equality across the board there is - often quite literally - one rule for women and another for men. What's equal about that?
Surely the only true test of equality is a simple one. A little gender role reversal will do it. Imagine the same Oven Pride ad with women portrayed as imbeciles incapable of performing a simple domestic task. The firm would be flayed alive as sexist pigs and commercial chauvinists.
So why in 21st-century Britain is it OK to ridicule men but not women? If we believe in satirising gender stereotypes, then everyone should be up for grabs, so to speak.
But then the problem extends much further than the age-old battle of the sexes. It reaches into every arena of public life in which a supposedly weaker group is entitled to mock or denigrate anyone or anything it chooses, but must never, ever be ridiculed or criticised in return. So it's fair game for any paid-up member of the commentariat to belittle heterosexual marriage, but gay partnerships are deemed beyond reproach.
It's culturally acceptable to make jokes about Christians, or openly denigrate their faith, but belittle or insult any minority religion in a similar vein and you will be branded a hateful bigot. It's fine for the bien pensants to sneer at Middle England with its bourgeois values, but should Middle England dare to pass opprobrium on the cultural values of any other group and they are condemned as quasi-fascists.
How can this be right? Surely equality should be a two-way street in which the jokes, the criticisms and the views are allowed to flow freely in both directions without minority lobby groups decreeing what is or isn't acceptable? Alas, I fear it is already too late.
Just look at some of the big news stories of the past few months for a snapshot of the new orthodoxy. In March this year, a large group of Muslims in Luton protested in the town with deeply offensive posters vilifying our returning troops, calling them rapists and murderers. Only two people were arrested that day. No, not any of the Muslim rabble, but two of the decent majority who could not tolerate this abuse against our brave troops and shouted back at the fanatics. They were eventually released without charge.
Or how about the boss of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, David Holmes, who described as 'retarded homophobes' those who believe that heterosexual couples make the most suitable adoptive parents. This, despite the fact that most ordinary families recognise that a child fares best when it has a married mother and father in the home - a belief that is backed by repeated academic studies.
Then there is the way Christians are routinely ignored in our society in a craven attempt to appease minority religions, with crosses banned from public buildings and civic officials reprimanded for daring to mention their faith in public. (Remember the nurse who almost lost her job for making the unforgivable error of praying for a patient?). You'd never imagine we are a country where more than 60 per cent of people still define themselves as Christian.
Can you imagine for a moment a devout Muslim nurse being suspended from the NHS because she prays to save a sick patient? Or a Christian succeeding in complaining about a traditional Muslim festival and having it cancelled - as so often happens each year in schools and town centres at Easter and Christmas. Of course not. Minority rules, OK.
Everywhere you look, double standards have become the order of the day. And the sorry truth is that there is almost no one left either able or willing to stand up for the views of the silent majority, who have been brushed aside by the PC zealots and their endless list of grievances - some real, many imagined.
The great British institutions, whether they be the BBC, the Church of England or Parliament, have been cowed into submission by the cheerleaders for minority rule. In their desperation to cause offence to no one, they no longer know what they stand for any more. Equality? To paraphrase Orwell, some are more equal than others.
SOURCE
Coroner's fury as great-grandfather, 86, dies after being dumped on NHS emergency trolley for 19 hours TWICE
Oh no! NOT a Royal Marine. How disgusting. The neglect below should not happen to anybody but Royal Marines are heroic men who should be treated with special honour
A Normandy veteran died after being abandoned on a hospital trolley for 19 hours - on two separate occasions. Walter Gibson, 86, suffered an agonising death from infected bedsores caused by his ordeal. Yesterday a coroner condemned the 'gross failings' and 'neglect' that contributed to the great-grandfather's death.
Mr Gibson, who had Parkinson's disease, was admitted to Queen's Hospital in Romford, Essex, in December 2007 with a chest infection. But the flagship 200million, three-year-old hospital did not have enough beds to accommodate him, an inquest heard. Instead Mr Gibson was left on an A&E trolley - designed to be used for up to 12 hours - for 19 hours. By the time he returned to his care home after treatment Mr Gibson had developed painful bedsores.
Days later, on New Year's Day 2008, he was admitted to the hospital again with pneumonia. Astonishingly, he was forced to endure another agonising 19 hours on a trolley as he waited for a bed. When Mr Gibson was finally seen by locum consultant physician Dr O A Elegbe, it was clear the bedsores - also called pressure sores - had become far more severe and were infected. One of the sores had developed into a 'grade four' ulcer - deep enough to expose tendon and bone. The wounds were dressed, but it was another 12 hours before he was moved to a ward where he could be placed on a pressure-relieving mattress.
By then, however, it was too late. Mr Gibson died on January 12 of septicaemia as a result of the open bedsores. Bronchial pneumonia was also found to be a contributing factor in his death. Yesterday coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox passed a verdict of death by natural causes, contributed to by neglect.
Dr Wilcox told Walthamstow Coroner's Court in East London: 'It is quite clear from the evidence I've heard that the length of time Mr Gibson waited at A&E both the first and second time - the second time added insult to injury to a man already completely dependent - made a significant contribution to his death.' She added: 'He was at very, very high risk of pressure sores and he should have been provided with appropriate protection against worsening of the pressure sores.'
Mr Gibson's wife Pheobe, 82, lives in a care home in Dagenham. The couple had three daughters, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Mr Gibson served as a Royal Marine during the Second World War and was involved in the D-Day landings.
Two of his daughters, Jacqueline With and Kay Newton, and his granddaughter Vicky Newton were in court to hear the coroner's criticisms of the hospital. Mrs With, 62, said after the inquest: 'We were angry and upset when we found out that the bedsores were a factor in his death, they had got infected and he got septicaemia. 'If he hadn't had to wait so long on the trolley he wouldn't have got the bedsores and may have survived longer.' She added: 'I know hospital A&E is a busy place but I feel the elderly should be fast-tracked through. 'It's a hard task for the doctors and nurses trying to treat people but something needs to be done. More money needs to be put into emergency care or there should be a specialist unit for the elderly.'
The coroner urged Queen's Hospital to increase training for nurses, step up risk assessment of patients likely to develop pressure sores and provide more air mattresses.
Mrs With, of South Ockendon, Essex, said: 'I genuinely hope the recommendations go through so that no one else has to suffer the terrible way my poor dad did.' The Daily Mail's Dignity For The Elderly campaign has highlighted how vulnerable older patients are sometimes not given the care they deserve in hospital.
A spokesman for Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust, which runs Queen's Hospital, said: 'Our sympathies are with Mr Gibson's family at this difficult time. 'Over the past year, the trust, in partnership with the primary care trusts, has reviewed and streamlined the processes for patients attending A&E to ensure that they can be admitted and cared for in the right setting to meet individual needs. 'A list of recommended actions from the coroner will be submitted to the trust for implementation and response. 'The trust takes very seriously what lessons can be learnt in order to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.' [Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t]
SOURCE
Friday, May 22, 2009
The 'family wreckers': British social workers attacked over race rules that rob foster children of a caring home
Social workers were under fire last night after a report revealed they were breaking up foster families because the parents were the wrong colour. It said official attempts to take mixed-race and black children away from white foster parents are heard 'regularly' in the family courts. Race rules say they can only be adopted by adults of the same ethnic background. The guidance claims ethnic minority children suffer mental health difficulties if brought up by white parents.
But critics attacked the policy as misguided. Patricia Morgan, an author on adoption and the family, said: 'There is no evidence that children brought up by parents of a different race suffer mental health problems. 'If that was true President Obama would be a danger to us all.' The U.S. leader was born to a white American mother and an African father.
The research on fostering and race, carried out for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, said social workers were 'confused' about why race rules were being used to decide the future of children. It said they were guided by skin colour, and when they spoke about culture 'they were often referring only to ethnic categorisations'.
The Bristol University researchers said that of 50 ethnic minority children whose adoption cases it followed, only 13 actually found new parents due to the insistence on 'same race placements'. In one case a nurse offered to adopt an ethnically mixed child with severe disabilities. She was turned down because she could not meet the 'Polish element' in the child's ethnicity. The child remained in state care.
Children who are adopted do much better than children left in the state care system, where most get no school qualifications and go on to lives of unemployment, drug addiction, crime and prostitution. The report is to be published in full later this summer.
Its disclosure comes after last week's row over the state-funded British Association for Adoption and Fostering's guide for gay couples. It referred to opponents of gay adoption as 'retarded homophobes' who 'need an excuse to whinge'. It later apologised.`
BAAF remains one of the greatest advocates of applying race rules to adoption. But the Bristol report said this results in regular attempts at the deliberate destruction of foster families in which parents and children have formed a bond. In cases followed for the Pathways to Permanence for Black, Asian and Mixed Ethnicity Children report, the courts found in favour of the foster carers, it said. It added that the hearings led to 'professional disagreements' and 'disarray' in relationships between local councils and foster parents.
Tory MP Julian Brazier said: 'The problem goes back to adoption law. Some of us warned when the Adoption and Children Act was passed in 2002 that this would happen.' The Act - which first allowed gay couples to adopt - says that in adoption there must be 'due consideration to the child's religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background'. A spokesman for the DCSF said: 'We know that children thrive better if adopted by a family who share their ethnic origin or cultural group, as well as meeting their other needs.'
SOURCE
British court rules taxi driver falsely accused of rape can receive compensation in legal first
A taxi driver falsely accused of rape could receive a five-figure compensation payout after winning a landmark victory. Clive Bishop, 49, says his life was ruined after a drunken 17-year-old passenger claimed he attacked her. Kirsty Palmer later admitted she made up the allegations and was jailed for ten months for perverting the course of justice.
When he applied for compensation, Mr Bishop described how months of living under a cloud of 'slurs and lies' had caused him enormous suffering. But the foster carer was twice refused a payout by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority on the grounds he had not come to physical harm. That ruling has now been overturned on appeal - the first time the authority has agreed to compensate for the mental trauma of a false criminal accusation. It is not known exactly how much he will receive but his lawyers estimate it could be up to 10,000.
Mr Bishop, who has fostered ten children with his wife Sue, picked up Palmer in his taxi from a nightclub in February 2007. The mother of two was drunk and had already been sick. But only hours after dropping her at her home, police arrived at Mr Bishop's house at 4.30am and arrested him in front of his wife on suspicion of rape. Mr Bishop said: 'I kept trying to explain to the police that it was nonsense. 'But I kept being told to shut up. I was in shock but convinced that they'd realise I hadn't done anything and let me go.'
Mr Bishop was questioned for 12 hours before being subjected to 'humiliating' intimate forensic examinations and bailed. His taxi was also seized for forensic examination and he was under police scrutiny for a further three months. Ostracised by his community, Mr Bishop says he tried to return to driving his taxi, but found himself unable to find work.
Months later, Palmer confessed that after being locked out of her house in her drunken state she had knocked on a neighbour's door and falsely claimed she had been raped. But despite her admission, Mr Bishop was twice refused compensation because he had no physical injuries. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority overturned those decisions last week at a closed hearing in Taunton, Somerset.
Mr Bishop will now undergo a psychological evaluation to determine the amount he will be eligible to receive before officially applying for compensation later this year. The amount he gets will depend on the psychological damage he suffered from the incident as well as his lost earnings.
Yesterday Mr Bishop, from Walton in Somerset, told how he had been 'to hell and back'. 'It's been such a difficult time for me and my wife,' he said. 'They claim you are innocent until proven guilty but in reality that is not the case. People always assume the worst and we had to live with three months of slurs and lies about my character. 'That is why this ruling is so important to me - I could not ever drive a taxi again so this decision will make a huge difference to my life. I'm just so very happy and relieved.'
His lawyer Russell Pearce said: 'It is a landmark case - especially for all those who have suffered the extensive trauma that a false allegation can bring. 'This now means that in the future other people will be able to make an application, which is very important.'
SOURCE
NHS kills thousands. Compensation paltry
Thousands of haemophiliacs who contracted HIV and hepatitis C from infected blood have "only had their anguish compounded" by a new Government statement on compensation, the head of the inquiry into the scandal said today. Lord Archer of Sandwell, who conducted a two-year review of how haemophiliacs were given NHS transfusions of contaminated blood, said the response from ministers was "deeply disquieting".
Dawn Primarolo, the public health minister, announced today that haemophiliacs who contracted HIV from infected blood will receive annual payments of 12,800, double the current sums paid through trusts set up to support victims. Some 4,670 haemophiliacs who received blood transfusions in the 1970s and 1980s were infected with hepatitis C, of whom 1,243 were also infected with HIV.
However Ms Primarolo said that The Skipton Fund - which provides lump sum payments to people infected with hepatitis C - will receive no extra funding. She added that ministers will review the situation again in 2014.
Responding to the announcement, Lord Archer said: "The Government response is a faltering step that only compounds the anguish of the afflicted and bereaved. "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that humanitarian impulses have come a bad second to Treasury constraints." He branded the new funding for patients with HIV, "paltry" and said the failure to increase help available to victims with Hepatitis C and to offer payment to their dependants was, "sadly lacking both in understanding and in compassion".
For years the NHS used imported blood from the US to treat haemophiliacs. It was often collected from paid "skid row" donors such as prison inmates who were more likely to have HIV and hepatitis. Nearly 2,000 people have died as a result of exposure to the tainted blood.
The Archer inquiry heard evidence from Lord Winston describing the blood contamination as "the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS". Lord Archer suggested a Government apology, a statutory advisory panel and compensation at least equal to that paid to patients in Ireland where those infected with HIV from contaminated blood received up to 101,000 euros and those who contracted hepatitis C were paid on average 853,636 euros.
But the Government rejected campaigners' demands for substantial compensation payments, instead announcing a slight increase of funding for the Macfarlane and Eileen Trusts to allow annual payments of 12,800 to each HIV infected person. Both trusts will also be given more funding so they can make higher payments to the families and dependants of victims. Spouses of those who die as a result of the infection will still not get any financial help from the Government.
The minister also rejected calls by Lord Archer for a government advisory committee on haemophilia. Instead she said the Department of Health will invite the Haemophilia Alliance - a group of patients, haemophilia doctors, and those involved in their care - to meet with the Government twice yearly. Ms Primarolo also pledged 100,000 each year for the next five years to the Haemophilia Society. She said: "I thank Lord Archer for his very thorough report. The Government has the greatest sympathy for those who have been affected and deeply regrets that these events came about following NHS treatment."
Chris James, chief executive of the Haemophilia Society, said the Government had tried to "water down" and "ignore" Lord Archer's recommendations and presented "a collection of half-measures". He said he would write directly to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Tory leader David Cameron and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg asking for an urgent meeting because the Department of Health, he said, "have shown themselves to be incapable of the simple human compassion and understanding required to deal with the victims of this disaster". No health minister attended the two-year inquiry, despite repeated requests. "The Government claims to accept the moral case for action but then, by not implementing the recommendations in full, it shows its contempt for the victims."
Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said: "The Government's response is deeply disappointing and underlines how appallingly it has behaved over this issue. This is one of the most serious tragedies in the history of the NHS."
SOURCE
70% of Britons want big cuts in the rate of immigration
Seven out of ten adults want a massive cut in immigration, a poll has revealed. The YouGov survey found that just one person in 20 supports the current record levels, which have boosted Britain's population by 300,000 a year over the past five years. The findings suggest immigration could become a significant election issue and sparked warnings that voters could turn to extremist parties if mainstream politicians fail to acknowledge their concerns.
The poll, commissioned by MigrationWatch for the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration, was published on the eve of the release of immigration figures today. It found that 79 per cent of people were concerned or very concerned about immigration. Seventy per cent of the 2,072 respondents favoured cutting levels by 80 per cent or more. Of those, 17 per cent said net immigration should be brought below 50,000 a year - a level last seen in the early 1990s.
Another 39 per cent favoured a policy of zero net immigration, with the numbers settling in the UK matching the numbers emigrating. Sixteen per cent said the number of immigrants should be lower than those leaving. Just over half of more affluent voters - ABC1s - wanted either zero or negative net immigration, while 63 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds favoured a figure below 50,000.
Home Office ministers say their new points-based immigration system represents a tough crackdown. [Crap! It affects only a tiny proportion of arrivals] But critics say it will have little effect, especially as Britain has no control over the numbers arriving from EU states, including eastern Europe.
SOURCE
Alzheimer's research links postponed retirement with later onset
I am glad that there is at least SOME humility expressed below about the implications of the correlation. That early signs of Alzheimers might tend to force people into retirement seems not to have been considered. So which is it?" Early retirement causes Alzheimers or Alzheimers causes early retirement?" Nobody knows -- despite the confident pronunciamentos from some of the people quoted below. The usual epidemiological crap
Working until 65 or beyond could postpone the onset of dementia. A study of 382 men found a significant association between later retirement and later onset of Alzheimer's disease. The research supports previous theories that keeping the mind active for as long as possible can help to postpone mental decline. In contrast to earlier studies, however, the researchers found that the quality or duration of the men's education or the type of work they did had no impact on the age of onset of the disease.
The team from Cardiff University and the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, identified men with "probable" Alzheimer's disease from clinical databases from the Medical Research Council and Alzheimer's Research Trust. They compared their retirement dates and found that every extra year worked postponed the onset of dementia symptoms by nearly six weeks.
The National Institute for Economic and Social Research has suggested that the official retirement age be raised to 70 within a decade to mitigate the effects of government debt.
Publishing their findings today in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, the study authors say that the association between later retirement age and later Alzheimer's onset was "significant". But, they add, there could be several explanations for this, including previous ill health having influenced a decision to retire. Further studies were needed across a wider group of people to confirm the findings, they said.
The Alzheimer's Society said: "There could be a number of reasons why later retirement in men is linked with later onset of dementia. Men who retire early often do so because of health conditions, such as hypertension or diabetes, which increase your risk of dementia. It could also be that working helps keep your mind and body active, which may reduce risk of dementia. "The best way to reduce your risk of dementia is to combine keeping physically active, with eating a balanced diet and getting your blood pressure and cholesterol checked regularly."
There are 700,000 people in Britain with dementia, 417,000 of whom suffer from Alzheimer's disease. It is expected that a further one million people will develop dementia in the next ten years. The average age of retirement for the men in the study was 63.3 years. The average age of onset of Alzheimer's was 75.6 years.
Simon Lovestone, scientific adviser to the Alzheimer's Research Trust and the paper's co-author, said: "The intellectual stimulation that older people gain from the workplace may prevent a decline in mental abilities, thus keeping people above the threshold for dementia for longer. Much more research is needed if we are to understand how to delay, or even prevent, dementia."
Rebecca Wood, chief of the research trust, which funded the study, said: "More people than ever retire later in life to avert financial hardship, but there may be a silver lining: lower dementia risk. Much more research into lifestyle factors is needed if we are to whittle down the 17 billion a year that dementia costs our economy."
SOURCE
Social workers were under fire last night after a report revealed they were breaking up foster families because the parents were the wrong colour. It said official attempts to take mixed-race and black children away from white foster parents are heard 'regularly' in the family courts. Race rules say they can only be adopted by adults of the same ethnic background. The guidance claims ethnic minority children suffer mental health difficulties if brought up by white parents.
But critics attacked the policy as misguided. Patricia Morgan, an author on adoption and the family, said: 'There is no evidence that children brought up by parents of a different race suffer mental health problems. 'If that was true President Obama would be a danger to us all.' The U.S. leader was born to a white American mother and an African father.
The research on fostering and race, carried out for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, said social workers were 'confused' about why race rules were being used to decide the future of children. It said they were guided by skin colour, and when they spoke about culture 'they were often referring only to ethnic categorisations'.
The Bristol University researchers said that of 50 ethnic minority children whose adoption cases it followed, only 13 actually found new parents due to the insistence on 'same race placements'. In one case a nurse offered to adopt an ethnically mixed child with severe disabilities. She was turned down because she could not meet the 'Polish element' in the child's ethnicity. The child remained in state care.
Children who are adopted do much better than children left in the state care system, where most get no school qualifications and go on to lives of unemployment, drug addiction, crime and prostitution. The report is to be published in full later this summer.
Its disclosure comes after last week's row over the state-funded British Association for Adoption and Fostering's guide for gay couples. It referred to opponents of gay adoption as 'retarded homophobes' who 'need an excuse to whinge'. It later apologised.`
BAAF remains one of the greatest advocates of applying race rules to adoption. But the Bristol report said this results in regular attempts at the deliberate destruction of foster families in which parents and children have formed a bond. In cases followed for the Pathways to Permanence for Black, Asian and Mixed Ethnicity Children report, the courts found in favour of the foster carers, it said. It added that the hearings led to 'professional disagreements' and 'disarray' in relationships between local councils and foster parents.
Tory MP Julian Brazier said: 'The problem goes back to adoption law. Some of us warned when the Adoption and Children Act was passed in 2002 that this would happen.' The Act - which first allowed gay couples to adopt - says that in adoption there must be 'due consideration to the child's religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background'. A spokesman for the DCSF said: 'We know that children thrive better if adopted by a family who share their ethnic origin or cultural group, as well as meeting their other needs.'
SOURCE
British court rules taxi driver falsely accused of rape can receive compensation in legal first
A taxi driver falsely accused of rape could receive a five-figure compensation payout after winning a landmark victory. Clive Bishop, 49, says his life was ruined after a drunken 17-year-old passenger claimed he attacked her. Kirsty Palmer later admitted she made up the allegations and was jailed for ten months for perverting the course of justice.
When he applied for compensation, Mr Bishop described how months of living under a cloud of 'slurs and lies' had caused him enormous suffering. But the foster carer was twice refused a payout by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority on the grounds he had not come to physical harm. That ruling has now been overturned on appeal - the first time the authority has agreed to compensate for the mental trauma of a false criminal accusation. It is not known exactly how much he will receive but his lawyers estimate it could be up to 10,000.
Mr Bishop, who has fostered ten children with his wife Sue, picked up Palmer in his taxi from a nightclub in February 2007. The mother of two was drunk and had already been sick. But only hours after dropping her at her home, police arrived at Mr Bishop's house at 4.30am and arrested him in front of his wife on suspicion of rape. Mr Bishop said: 'I kept trying to explain to the police that it was nonsense. 'But I kept being told to shut up. I was in shock but convinced that they'd realise I hadn't done anything and let me go.'
Mr Bishop was questioned for 12 hours before being subjected to 'humiliating' intimate forensic examinations and bailed. His taxi was also seized for forensic examination and he was under police scrutiny for a further three months. Ostracised by his community, Mr Bishop says he tried to return to driving his taxi, but found himself unable to find work.
Months later, Palmer confessed that after being locked out of her house in her drunken state she had knocked on a neighbour's door and falsely claimed she had been raped. But despite her admission, Mr Bishop was twice refused compensation because he had no physical injuries. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority overturned those decisions last week at a closed hearing in Taunton, Somerset.
Mr Bishop will now undergo a psychological evaluation to determine the amount he will be eligible to receive before officially applying for compensation later this year. The amount he gets will depend on the psychological damage he suffered from the incident as well as his lost earnings.
Yesterday Mr Bishop, from Walton in Somerset, told how he had been 'to hell and back'. 'It's been such a difficult time for me and my wife,' he said. 'They claim you are innocent until proven guilty but in reality that is not the case. People always assume the worst and we had to live with three months of slurs and lies about my character. 'That is why this ruling is so important to me - I could not ever drive a taxi again so this decision will make a huge difference to my life. I'm just so very happy and relieved.'
His lawyer Russell Pearce said: 'It is a landmark case - especially for all those who have suffered the extensive trauma that a false allegation can bring. 'This now means that in the future other people will be able to make an application, which is very important.'
SOURCE
NHS kills thousands. Compensation paltry
Thousands of haemophiliacs who contracted HIV and hepatitis C from infected blood have "only had their anguish compounded" by a new Government statement on compensation, the head of the inquiry into the scandal said today. Lord Archer of Sandwell, who conducted a two-year review of how haemophiliacs were given NHS transfusions of contaminated blood, said the response from ministers was "deeply disquieting".
Dawn Primarolo, the public health minister, announced today that haemophiliacs who contracted HIV from infected blood will receive annual payments of 12,800, double the current sums paid through trusts set up to support victims. Some 4,670 haemophiliacs who received blood transfusions in the 1970s and 1980s were infected with hepatitis C, of whom 1,243 were also infected with HIV.
However Ms Primarolo said that The Skipton Fund - which provides lump sum payments to people infected with hepatitis C - will receive no extra funding. She added that ministers will review the situation again in 2014.
Responding to the announcement, Lord Archer said: "The Government response is a faltering step that only compounds the anguish of the afflicted and bereaved. "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that humanitarian impulses have come a bad second to Treasury constraints." He branded the new funding for patients with HIV, "paltry" and said the failure to increase help available to victims with Hepatitis C and to offer payment to their dependants was, "sadly lacking both in understanding and in compassion".
For years the NHS used imported blood from the US to treat haemophiliacs. It was often collected from paid "skid row" donors such as prison inmates who were more likely to have HIV and hepatitis. Nearly 2,000 people have died as a result of exposure to the tainted blood.
The Archer inquiry heard evidence from Lord Winston describing the blood contamination as "the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS". Lord Archer suggested a Government apology, a statutory advisory panel and compensation at least equal to that paid to patients in Ireland where those infected with HIV from contaminated blood received up to 101,000 euros and those who contracted hepatitis C were paid on average 853,636 euros.
But the Government rejected campaigners' demands for substantial compensation payments, instead announcing a slight increase of funding for the Macfarlane and Eileen Trusts to allow annual payments of 12,800 to each HIV infected person. Both trusts will also be given more funding so they can make higher payments to the families and dependants of victims. Spouses of those who die as a result of the infection will still not get any financial help from the Government.
The minister also rejected calls by Lord Archer for a government advisory committee on haemophilia. Instead she said the Department of Health will invite the Haemophilia Alliance - a group of patients, haemophilia doctors, and those involved in their care - to meet with the Government twice yearly. Ms Primarolo also pledged 100,000 each year for the next five years to the Haemophilia Society. She said: "I thank Lord Archer for his very thorough report. The Government has the greatest sympathy for those who have been affected and deeply regrets that these events came about following NHS treatment."
Chris James, chief executive of the Haemophilia Society, said the Government had tried to "water down" and "ignore" Lord Archer's recommendations and presented "a collection of half-measures". He said he would write directly to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Tory leader David Cameron and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg asking for an urgent meeting because the Department of Health, he said, "have shown themselves to be incapable of the simple human compassion and understanding required to deal with the victims of this disaster". No health minister attended the two-year inquiry, despite repeated requests. "The Government claims to accept the moral case for action but then, by not implementing the recommendations in full, it shows its contempt for the victims."
Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said: "The Government's response is deeply disappointing and underlines how appallingly it has behaved over this issue. This is one of the most serious tragedies in the history of the NHS."
SOURCE
70% of Britons want big cuts in the rate of immigration
Seven out of ten adults want a massive cut in immigration, a poll has revealed. The YouGov survey found that just one person in 20 supports the current record levels, which have boosted Britain's population by 300,000 a year over the past five years. The findings suggest immigration could become a significant election issue and sparked warnings that voters could turn to extremist parties if mainstream politicians fail to acknowledge their concerns.
The poll, commissioned by MigrationWatch for the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration, was published on the eve of the release of immigration figures today. It found that 79 per cent of people were concerned or very concerned about immigration. Seventy per cent of the 2,072 respondents favoured cutting levels by 80 per cent or more. Of those, 17 per cent said net immigration should be brought below 50,000 a year - a level last seen in the early 1990s.
Another 39 per cent favoured a policy of zero net immigration, with the numbers settling in the UK matching the numbers emigrating. Sixteen per cent said the number of immigrants should be lower than those leaving. Just over half of more affluent voters - ABC1s - wanted either zero or negative net immigration, while 63 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds favoured a figure below 50,000.
Home Office ministers say their new points-based immigration system represents a tough crackdown. [Crap! It affects only a tiny proportion of arrivals] But critics say it will have little effect, especially as Britain has no control over the numbers arriving from EU states, including eastern Europe.
SOURCE
Alzheimer's research links postponed retirement with later onset
I am glad that there is at least SOME humility expressed below about the implications of the correlation. That early signs of Alzheimers might tend to force people into retirement seems not to have been considered. So which is it?" Early retirement causes Alzheimers or Alzheimers causes early retirement?" Nobody knows -- despite the confident pronunciamentos from some of the people quoted below. The usual epidemiological crap
Working until 65 or beyond could postpone the onset of dementia. A study of 382 men found a significant association between later retirement and later onset of Alzheimer's disease. The research supports previous theories that keeping the mind active for as long as possible can help to postpone mental decline. In contrast to earlier studies, however, the researchers found that the quality or duration of the men's education or the type of work they did had no impact on the age of onset of the disease.
The team from Cardiff University and the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, identified men with "probable" Alzheimer's disease from clinical databases from the Medical Research Council and Alzheimer's Research Trust. They compared their retirement dates and found that every extra year worked postponed the onset of dementia symptoms by nearly six weeks.
The National Institute for Economic and Social Research has suggested that the official retirement age be raised to 70 within a decade to mitigate the effects of government debt.
Publishing their findings today in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, the study authors say that the association between later retirement age and later Alzheimer's onset was "significant". But, they add, there could be several explanations for this, including previous ill health having influenced a decision to retire. Further studies were needed across a wider group of people to confirm the findings, they said.
The Alzheimer's Society said: "There could be a number of reasons why later retirement in men is linked with later onset of dementia. Men who retire early often do so because of health conditions, such as hypertension or diabetes, which increase your risk of dementia. It could also be that working helps keep your mind and body active, which may reduce risk of dementia. "The best way to reduce your risk of dementia is to combine keeping physically active, with eating a balanced diet and getting your blood pressure and cholesterol checked regularly."
There are 700,000 people in Britain with dementia, 417,000 of whom suffer from Alzheimer's disease. It is expected that a further one million people will develop dementia in the next ten years. The average age of retirement for the men in the study was 63.3 years. The average age of onset of Alzheimer's was 75.6 years.
Simon Lovestone, scientific adviser to the Alzheimer's Research Trust and the paper's co-author, said: "The intellectual stimulation that older people gain from the workplace may prevent a decline in mental abilities, thus keeping people above the threshold for dementia for longer. Much more research is needed if we are to understand how to delay, or even prevent, dementia."
Rebecca Wood, chief of the research trust, which funded the study, said: "More people than ever retire later in life to avert financial hardship, but there may be a silver lining: lower dementia risk. Much more research into lifestyle factors is needed if we are to whittle down the 17 billion a year that dementia costs our economy."
SOURCE
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Why is the NHS killing so many with drugs?
An extraordinary rise in the number of patients killed by drugs given out by the Health Service has led to calls for an investigation. The figure has more than doubled since Labour came to power, rising from 520 in 1998 to 1,299 last year. Official figures also show that the number of such deaths last year was up by more than a quarter on the figure of 1,030 recorded in 2007.
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb, who obtained the statistics following a parliamentary question, said: 'The Government needs to urgently investigate this extraordinary rise. 'The public needs to know why these adverse reactions are happening more frequently and why the trend appears to be increasing so much. 'Patient safety is being compromised. Ministers must ensure that better information on prescription drugs is available for patients and doctors.'
Some experts blamed the increase on failures in the training of hospital doctors and Labour's decision to hand greater prescribing powers to nurses.
The figures show that in 2008, a total of 25,424 reports of adverse reactions to drugs - both fatal and non-fatal - were made to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the government organisation in charge of drug safety. They were up by 17 per cent on 2007 and by 41 per cent in a decade. Of these patients, 4,487 had to stay in hospital for several days following side effects from medication - around the same as in 2007 but up by more than 50 per cent on 1998. The figures mainly cover drugs handed out on prescription, but they also relate to over-the-counter and herbal medicines.
Peter Walsh, of pressure group Action Against Medical Accidents, said: 'There are far too many complications resulting in harm or death. These numbers must be reduced, and it must be in the gift of a modern NHS to get them down. 'The true figure will undoubtedly be much higher, because not all incidents are reported [by hospitals and GPs]. And in many cases doctors simply do not know what caused a sudden deterioration or a death - the drugs or another cause. 'Problems with medicines are one of the biggest patient safety issues faced by the NHS.'
Mr Walsh said better reporting of adverse reactions could be the reason behind some of the rise. But there was also the problem of new drugs, and complicated therapies that include combinations of drugs. These 'cutting-edge' treatments often have unknown side effects. Adverse reactions can also occur where doctors do not know what other drugs a patient is taking, or about allergic reactions they suffer from. Errors in identifying patients - with drugs being given to the wrong patient - and in dosages, also cause numerous deaths, he said.
The Daily Mail revealed in January that the number of patients killed by hospital blunders has soared by 60 per cent in only two years. Official records show that 3,645 died as a result of outbreaks of infections, botched operations and other mistakes in 2007/2008, up from 2,275 two years before.
Critics say that the quality of NHS care has suffered as doctors and nurses come under pressure to meet Government waiting time targets. A spokesman for the MHRA said a number of factors are thought to have played a role in the rise in fatal adverse drug reactions including changes in pharmaceutical companies' reporting of the reactions and increased prescribing of drugs. 'It is not possible to pick out one single factor influencing this trend,' she added.
SOURCE
British Mother banned from breastfeeding at poolside 'breached food and drink rules'
But publicity works its usual wonders. Unrepentant authorities suddenly go into reverse
A mother was told to stop breastfeeding because she was contravening a leisure centre's poolside food and drink ban. Laura Whotton began feeding her three-month-old son Joshua after they had a swim together, because he was hungry and starting to cry. Both had towels draped around them as they sat on a bench by the poolside. But a male lifeguard spotted them and marched over to question Mrs Whotton.
The mother of two said she had taken care to cover up and he had to ask her: 'Are you breastfeeding?' She was then told: 'You are in a public area, you can't breastfeed because there are children here.' The shocked mother explained she was entitled to 'by law' and told him she was not indecent and not offending anyone. She was offered a 'private room' to breastfeed Joshua but refused because she was keeping an eye on her four-year-old son Thomas, who was swimming in a nearby toddler's pool. When the lifeguard refused to back down, she decided to leave the leisure centre.
Mrs Whotton, 26, of Carrington in Nottingham, said: 'I felt really angry at being treated like that. 'I wasn't embarrassed because I didn't have anything on show. People in bikinis were showing more skin and breast than I was. 'It's the most natural thing in the world - and I was made to feel like I was doing something terrible. 'I've fed my baby on the bus and on a tram and in McDonald's. If he needs feeding I will do it.'
The incident happened on a Saturday afternoon earlier this month at the John Carroll Leisure Centre in Nottingham. Mrs Whotton, who is married to Craig, 26, a hire car driver, lodged a complaint with Nottingham City Council.
A spokesman for the local authority said: 'The council's policy is to enable mothers to breastfeed in all council centres, including leisure centres.
The only exception to this rule at leisure centres is in the swimming pool and surrounding area, where, in the interests of safety and hygiene, there is a policy of no food or drink. This rule also covers breastfeeding, as it would the bottle feeding of a baby.'
Now the council has given her a 'full and open apology' and has 'reviewed and amended' its breastfeeding policy. Operations manager Lee Kimberley told her the lifeguard at the pool was 'acting in accordance-with current policy'. But he added: 'The manner in which it was done was not appropriate.'
Breastfeeding mothers are to get extra legal protection by the Equality Bill, which will become law next year if passed by Parliament. This will give them the right to breastfeed a child in any public place and protect them from being forced out of cafes and shops. It is being introduced after campaigners argued the rights were not clearly outlined or properly enforced under existing law.
SOURCE
Britain's antisemitic cultural Left at work
A row threatened to engulf the Edinburgh International Film Festival yesterday after it bowed to pressure from the director Ken Loach and returned a 300 grant it had received from the Israeli Embassy.
Sir Jeremy Isaacs, the former chief executive of Channel Four, accused the festival's organisers of making "an appalling decision" and called on them to rescind it. Describing Loach's intervention as an act of censorship, he said: "They must not allow someone who has no real position, no rock to stand on, to interfere with their programming." The grant was intended to enable Tali Shalom Ezer, a graduate of Tel Aviv University, to travel to Scotland for a screening of her film, Surrogate.
After days of protest against the award from pro-Palestinian organisations, Loach, an outspoken opponent of Israel's policies in Lebanon and Gaza, urged filmgoers on Monday to boycott Edinburgh. "The massacres and state terrorism in Gaza make this money unacceptable," he said. "With regret, I must urge all who might consider visiting the festival to show their support for the Palestinian nation and stay away."
The intervention brought an immediate capitulation from the organisers. In a statement the festival said it accepted that Loach spoke "on behalf of the film community, therefore we will be returning the funding issued by the Israeli Embassy".
Sir Jeremy said that he was disgusted both by Loach's actions and by the capitulation of the festival organisers. "Ken Loach has always been critical of censorship of his own work, albeit it was many years in the past. The idea that he should lend himself to the denial of a film-maker's right to show her work is absolutely appalling," he said. He was "equally horrified" that festival organisers should accept that Loach was speaking on behalf of all British film-makers.
Sir Jeremy worked closely with Loach in the 1980s when, as chief executive of Channel Four, he commissioned a number of controversial documentaries from him. One, A Question of Leadership, was made in 1981 but never broadcast, leading to accusations of political censorship from Loach. The irony of the director's present position was all the more obvious, given the spirit of the Edinburgh festival, Sir Jeremy said. "It must be good for cinemagoers at an international film festival to see films by Jews, Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, to the benefit of all," he said. "I have admired the Edinburgh International Film Festival for many years and would like to think that this appalling decision will be rescinded."
Loach's acclaimed new film Looking for Eric has made him the toast of the Cannes Film Festival. It is, uncharacteristically, a comedy, although its lead character is an authentic Loach creation - a Mancunian postman who goes off in search of his idol, the footballer Eric Cantona.
Ezer's film makes no reference to war or politics. It is a romance set in a sex-therapy clinic. It won the audience award at an international women's film festival in Israel recently.
Lord Janner of Braunstone, a Labour peer and former chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said that he was disappointed by the festival's decision. "By banning the Israeli Embassy from supporting a film-maker the festival is helping to exclude Israelis from British cultural life, something that is clearly unfair."
Last night a spokesman for the EIFF said that although it had returned 300 to the Israeli Embassy, the festival itself would fund Ms Shalom-Ezer's travel to Edinburgh out of its own budget.
SOURCE
An extraordinary rise in the number of patients killed by drugs given out by the Health Service has led to calls for an investigation. The figure has more than doubled since Labour came to power, rising from 520 in 1998 to 1,299 last year. Official figures also show that the number of such deaths last year was up by more than a quarter on the figure of 1,030 recorded in 2007.
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb, who obtained the statistics following a parliamentary question, said: 'The Government needs to urgently investigate this extraordinary rise. 'The public needs to know why these adverse reactions are happening more frequently and why the trend appears to be increasing so much. 'Patient safety is being compromised. Ministers must ensure that better information on prescription drugs is available for patients and doctors.'
Some experts blamed the increase on failures in the training of hospital doctors and Labour's decision to hand greater prescribing powers to nurses.
The figures show that in 2008, a total of 25,424 reports of adverse reactions to drugs - both fatal and non-fatal - were made to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the government organisation in charge of drug safety. They were up by 17 per cent on 2007 and by 41 per cent in a decade. Of these patients, 4,487 had to stay in hospital for several days following side effects from medication - around the same as in 2007 but up by more than 50 per cent on 1998. The figures mainly cover drugs handed out on prescription, but they also relate to over-the-counter and herbal medicines.
Peter Walsh, of pressure group Action Against Medical Accidents, said: 'There are far too many complications resulting in harm or death. These numbers must be reduced, and it must be in the gift of a modern NHS to get them down. 'The true figure will undoubtedly be much higher, because not all incidents are reported [by hospitals and GPs]. And in many cases doctors simply do not know what caused a sudden deterioration or a death - the drugs or another cause. 'Problems with medicines are one of the biggest patient safety issues faced by the NHS.'
Mr Walsh said better reporting of adverse reactions could be the reason behind some of the rise. But there was also the problem of new drugs, and complicated therapies that include combinations of drugs. These 'cutting-edge' treatments often have unknown side effects. Adverse reactions can also occur where doctors do not know what other drugs a patient is taking, or about allergic reactions they suffer from. Errors in identifying patients - with drugs being given to the wrong patient - and in dosages, also cause numerous deaths, he said.
The Daily Mail revealed in January that the number of patients killed by hospital blunders has soared by 60 per cent in only two years. Official records show that 3,645 died as a result of outbreaks of infections, botched operations and other mistakes in 2007/2008, up from 2,275 two years before.
Critics say that the quality of NHS care has suffered as doctors and nurses come under pressure to meet Government waiting time targets. A spokesman for the MHRA said a number of factors are thought to have played a role in the rise in fatal adverse drug reactions including changes in pharmaceutical companies' reporting of the reactions and increased prescribing of drugs. 'It is not possible to pick out one single factor influencing this trend,' she added.
SOURCE
British Mother banned from breastfeeding at poolside 'breached food and drink rules'
But publicity works its usual wonders. Unrepentant authorities suddenly go into reverse
A mother was told to stop breastfeeding because she was contravening a leisure centre's poolside food and drink ban. Laura Whotton began feeding her three-month-old son Joshua after they had a swim together, because he was hungry and starting to cry. Both had towels draped around them as they sat on a bench by the poolside. But a male lifeguard spotted them and marched over to question Mrs Whotton.
The mother of two said she had taken care to cover up and he had to ask her: 'Are you breastfeeding?' She was then told: 'You are in a public area, you can't breastfeed because there are children here.' The shocked mother explained she was entitled to 'by law' and told him she was not indecent and not offending anyone. She was offered a 'private room' to breastfeed Joshua but refused because she was keeping an eye on her four-year-old son Thomas, who was swimming in a nearby toddler's pool. When the lifeguard refused to back down, she decided to leave the leisure centre.
Mrs Whotton, 26, of Carrington in Nottingham, said: 'I felt really angry at being treated like that. 'I wasn't embarrassed because I didn't have anything on show. People in bikinis were showing more skin and breast than I was. 'It's the most natural thing in the world - and I was made to feel like I was doing something terrible. 'I've fed my baby on the bus and on a tram and in McDonald's. If he needs feeding I will do it.'
The incident happened on a Saturday afternoon earlier this month at the John Carroll Leisure Centre in Nottingham. Mrs Whotton, who is married to Craig, 26, a hire car driver, lodged a complaint with Nottingham City Council.
A spokesman for the local authority said: 'The council's policy is to enable mothers to breastfeed in all council centres, including leisure centres.
The only exception to this rule at leisure centres is in the swimming pool and surrounding area, where, in the interests of safety and hygiene, there is a policy of no food or drink. This rule also covers breastfeeding, as it would the bottle feeding of a baby.'
Now the council has given her a 'full and open apology' and has 'reviewed and amended' its breastfeeding policy. Operations manager Lee Kimberley told her the lifeguard at the pool was 'acting in accordance-with current policy'. But he added: 'The manner in which it was done was not appropriate.'
Breastfeeding mothers are to get extra legal protection by the Equality Bill, which will become law next year if passed by Parliament. This will give them the right to breastfeed a child in any public place and protect them from being forced out of cafes and shops. It is being introduced after campaigners argued the rights were not clearly outlined or properly enforced under existing law.
SOURCE
Britain's antisemitic cultural Left at work
A row threatened to engulf the Edinburgh International Film Festival yesterday after it bowed to pressure from the director Ken Loach and returned a 300 grant it had received from the Israeli Embassy.
Sir Jeremy Isaacs, the former chief executive of Channel Four, accused the festival's organisers of making "an appalling decision" and called on them to rescind it. Describing Loach's intervention as an act of censorship, he said: "They must not allow someone who has no real position, no rock to stand on, to interfere with their programming." The grant was intended to enable Tali Shalom Ezer, a graduate of Tel Aviv University, to travel to Scotland for a screening of her film, Surrogate.
After days of protest against the award from pro-Palestinian organisations, Loach, an outspoken opponent of Israel's policies in Lebanon and Gaza, urged filmgoers on Monday to boycott Edinburgh. "The massacres and state terrorism in Gaza make this money unacceptable," he said. "With regret, I must urge all who might consider visiting the festival to show their support for the Palestinian nation and stay away."
The intervention brought an immediate capitulation from the organisers. In a statement the festival said it accepted that Loach spoke "on behalf of the film community, therefore we will be returning the funding issued by the Israeli Embassy".
Sir Jeremy said that he was disgusted both by Loach's actions and by the capitulation of the festival organisers. "Ken Loach has always been critical of censorship of his own work, albeit it was many years in the past. The idea that he should lend himself to the denial of a film-maker's right to show her work is absolutely appalling," he said. He was "equally horrified" that festival organisers should accept that Loach was speaking on behalf of all British film-makers.
Sir Jeremy worked closely with Loach in the 1980s when, as chief executive of Channel Four, he commissioned a number of controversial documentaries from him. One, A Question of Leadership, was made in 1981 but never broadcast, leading to accusations of political censorship from Loach. The irony of the director's present position was all the more obvious, given the spirit of the Edinburgh festival, Sir Jeremy said. "It must be good for cinemagoers at an international film festival to see films by Jews, Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, to the benefit of all," he said. "I have admired the Edinburgh International Film Festival for many years and would like to think that this appalling decision will be rescinded."
Loach's acclaimed new film Looking for Eric has made him the toast of the Cannes Film Festival. It is, uncharacteristically, a comedy, although its lead character is an authentic Loach creation - a Mancunian postman who goes off in search of his idol, the footballer Eric Cantona.
Ezer's film makes no reference to war or politics. It is a romance set in a sex-therapy clinic. It won the audience award at an international women's film festival in Israel recently.
Lord Janner of Braunstone, a Labour peer and former chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said that he was disappointed by the festival's decision. "By banning the Israeli Embassy from supporting a film-maker the festival is helping to exclude Israelis from British cultural life, something that is clearly unfair."
Last night a spokesman for the EIFF said that although it had returned 300 to the Israeli Embassy, the festival itself would fund Ms Shalom-Ezer's travel to Edinburgh out of its own budget.
SOURCE
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
School neckties are dangerous? Only in Britain
At least 10 schools a week are adopting clip-on ties amid fears conventional knots pose an injury risk, it was claimed. Concerns have been raised over children pulling them too tight for a joke and getting them caught in machinery.
Headteachers also claim they look scruffy as pupils wear fat knots or short tails as part of the latest fashion craze.
Research by the Schoolwear Association, which represents uniform manufacturers, said there had been rising demand for "safer" ties since January. Around 25 British schools change their ties every week, it said, with almost half of those opting for clip-ons.
The Campaign for Real Education condemned the move as "health and safety gone mad".
The Schoolwear Association, which surveyed members about the latest uniform "trends" also reported schools adding high visibility and reflective strips to school bags and scarves. The move is designed to improve road safety as children travel to and from school.
In a further development, the association said an "increasing number" of state schools were adopting house systems, which are traditionally associated with the fee-paying sector. They are ordering ties, polo shirts and scarves in house colours to differentiate between pupils, it was disclosed.
SOURCE
The mindlessness and destructiveness of Britain's Left-indoctrinated social workers again
Child abuser placed with young children. Ferals prioritized over decent people again. It's in their training. The middle class are contemptible, they are told. It's "the poor" who must be given every indulgence. And it was that total focus on "the poor" which was at the heart of the events reported below
Three social workers were suspended today after a youth with a history of sexual offences was placed in a home with two young children. The parents were not told of the teenager's troubled history and only discovered that he had been carrying out repeated sexual assaults on their two-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter months later. The 19-year-old was jailed indefinitely earlier this year after admitting raping the boy and sexually assaulting the girl.
Vale of Glamorgan Council in South Wales today apologised "unreservedly" to the family for placing him with them. An investigation overseen by the NSPCC found that social workers had been aware of his history but the information was not passed on when he became an adult. He spent several months living with the family under an adult placement scheme after becoming homeless.
The council's director of social services, Philip Evans, admitted that a serious mistake had been made. He said: "There are no excuses, this should never have happened. Some of our staff did not meet their individual and collective responsibilities for taking action to protect children. "We deeply regret the serious consequences for two young children and for their parents, people who have opened their home to vulnerable adults. We apologise sincerely and will try to make amends."
Social services failed to pass on information about the boy's background and the family had no idea of his history until their daughter told them that he had been assaulting her.
The report said that the youth had been regarded by social workers as a "vulnerable" young man who was himself in need of protection. It stated: "When the teenager became a young adult and staff were hoping him to find accommodation, they concentrated on his vulnerability. "Seen for the most part as a victim in many parts of his life, he was considered to be the one in need of protection. "Because of this focus, much of the relevant information was not made available to the parents of the children and to some of the staff making the decisions about accommodation. As a consequence they were denied the opportunity to take appropriate action to safeguard the children living in the home."
Mr Evans, who has refused to resign, said: "People reading this report will be distressed, shocked and angry at the serious mistakes that were made. They will also be concerned that other children are not made to suffer in this way. "This means facing up to the severe but justifiable criticism in the report to restore public trust in social services. Serious mistakes were made and we offer no excuses. "It is especially sad for us to have let down a family who opened their home on behalf of the community."
The report released today made 12 recommendations for improvement and said that disciplinary action had been started. Mr Evans said that he wants to see the action plan through and added: "This is not a time to be walking away from the problem." The three social services staff who have been suspended have not been identified but could lose their jobs after disciplinary hearings.
At his trial Cardiff Crown Court was told that the youth had a history of sexual offences against children. In 2003 he was accused of "sexually inappropriate behaviour" with a young boy. Two years later he admitted exposing himself and touching another young boy sexually while they were both living at a hostel. He was also dismissed from a job in a bowling alley in 2007 after parents discovered that he was trying to get the telephone numbers of young girls. He became homeless last year after he was accused of indecently assaulting a 16-year-old girl as she slept.
The Cardiff Recorder, Nicholas Cooke, QC, said that it was a matter of "grave concern" how the youth ended up with the family. The teenager was given an indefinite sentence and told that he would be released only when he was considered "no longer a risk". He was ordered to register as a sex offender and banned from working with children for life.
The Recorder said: "In this case a tragedy ensued for a family who only wished to serve the community and who were let down by the system. "They were unable to protect their own children because of a failure to provide them with information."
An NSPCC spokesman said: "We are deeply saddened by this tragic case and the impact on the lives of two young children and their parents. "From the outset the council acknowledged social services had made a serious error of judgement in placing the young man with the family."
Gordon Kemp, Vale of Glamorgan council leader, said that the family had been kept informed of the inquiry and its findings. He praised their "dignity" throughout the ordeal and said that they were "still committed" to the adult placement service. Councillor Kemp said: "It is clear there was a serious error of judgement. We have sought to work with the family to find out what assistance can be given to meet any needs they may have. "It has been an exceptionally difficult time for them. It is especially sad that these tragic events should have befallen a family who provide a service to vulnerable people in need of accommodation."
SOURCE
NHS doctors lied in their teeth to cover up their fatal negligence. But it's OK for doctors to lie and fabricate evidence in socialist Britain
One wonders how much of this goes on -- This only came to light because a father was savvy enough to have a clergyman witness his neglected son's medical records -- before the doctors changed them
By rights, Robbie Powell should have been celebrating his 30th birthday this year - still the apple of his daddy's eye and almost certainly, like his two elder brothers, settled and raising a young family. But 19 years ago he died suddenly, apparently after developing a stomach complaint.
Many parents would have shut themselves away to grieve, but not Robbie's father, Will. He vowed that he would discover what had gone so badly wrong - and has spent the past two decades trying to find out the truth. The effort has all but driven him mad, he says, as he's battled against the cynicism and sheer indifference of officialdom. He's been vilified as a fantasist and his family life has been destroyed - yet he has refused to give up. `The doctors involved believed they could wear me down - that I would give up, as most people eventually give up when making complaints about their doctors,' he says. `But I didn't.'
What he found is truly shocking. Not only did the GPs forge his son's medical notes, but in their attempts to cover up what had happened, they also lied to an inquiry set up into Robbie's death. Mr Powell's investigation also unravelled a truly horrifying fact. For the story of the boy who never grew up has exposed British doctors' best-kept secret - that they are under no legal obligation to tell the truth to a patient's family about the circumstances surrounding a death. Indeed, it is not even clear whether doctors can be prosecuted for falsifying patients' records.
This lack of legal obligation to tell the truth is unique in the developed world, and it may well have continued to go unnoticed were it not for Will Powell.
It would be difficult to overstate the terrier-like persistence with which the 55-year-old former car mechanic has painstakingly unpicked the doctors' version of the events surrounding the death of his darling boy. At his semi-detached house in the small Welsh town of Ystradgynlais, near Swansea, he sits surrounded by a pile of meticulously ordered files and copies of the 2,000 and more letters he has written to the authorities.
He has turned for help to every relevant state organisation - beginning with a ten-year battle to get the coroner to hold an inquest into his son's death, and involving local professional disciplinary bodies, civil courts, the European Court of Human Rights, the Welsh Office, the police and the General Medical Council (GMC).
What makes this story so alarming is that it exposes just how impotent families are when faced with doctors determined to cover up mistakes. Twenty years ago, the Powells were a happy, carefree family. Will, a Glaswegian, had moved to Ystradgynlais as a young man and married a Welsh girl, Diane. He became a keen angler and member of the local darts team, raising his three boys - Robbie, Justin, now 33, and Ian, 31 - in `an ordinary, working-class home where we worked hard to keep a roof over the boys' heads'. Robbie was a popular, happy, outgoing little boy - `Someone who made you feel loved and special,' recalls his father.
None of the children had ever had a serious illness until December 1989, when Robbie suffered a bout of stomach pain and vomiting that was so bad he was admitted to Morriston Hospital, Swansea. It later emerged that at least one hospital doctor suspected what proved to be true, that Robbie had Addison's disease - a rare, but highly treatable disease of the adrenal glands - but he failed to tell Will and Diane, or to conduct the test that would have confirmed it. The hospital has since acknowledged this doctor was negligent.
However, it is what then happened in the weeks immediately before and after Robbie's death that is most disturbing. Over three weeks, as the ten-year-old suffered vomiting, weight loss and stomach pains, he was seen seven times by five GPs from the local surgery. It has since been established that only one GP considered referring the boy back to hospital, but never did so. The others did not read the boy's notes, perform a blood test or even take his blood pressure. One tried to test his blood sugar, but found his kit was out of date. None recognised that they were dealing with a very sick boy in need of urgent transfer to hospital - instead telling his distraught parents there was nothing wrong with him.
In the final two days of his life, two of the five GPs saw Robbie, but failed to refer him to hospital - even though, at the time, he could not walk and was severely dehydrated. The afternoon of his death,15 days after he'd first fallen ill, a third GP was called to his house after he had been carried to the bathroom by his mother, where he collapsed, his lips blue and his pupils dilated.
`We didn't know it at the time, but he was already dying,' says Will. Yet the GP told the family that a throat infection diagnosed the day before had spread to his chest, and refused to refer him to hospital. When the parents called the surgery again an hour later, the GP returned, but refused again to send Robbie to hospital, had an argument with Will, relented, scribbled a referral note and walked angrily out of the house - leaving the parents to drive their son to hospital.
`I remember telling Robbie over and over again to stay awake because I didn't want the doctors to think he was just sleepy,' says Will. In fact, his son was lapsing in and out of consciousness. When the family arrived at the hospital, staff immediately called the crash team. As they later told the family, Robbie was `desperately ill and close to death' and `looked like someone from a concentration camp' because he was so dehydrated. He died as they tried to revive him.
Will grasped quite quickly that his son's death could have been avoided. `Addison's disease prevents the adrenal glands from pumping vital hormones around the body, reducing blood pressure and eventually causing a heart attack. `It's like a car running out of petrol - and I knew well enough from my knowledge of engines that the damage could have been halted.' Indeed, hydrocortisone and intravenous fluids can bring an emergency Addison's disease patient back to normal health in less than an hour.
`I extended my compassion to the GPs who had let my son die. I felt they must be suffering, too,' says Will. `But I think they misunderstood. I believe they saw me as someone with no education and thought I posed no risk to their reputations.' When he asked the senior partner to carry out an investigation into what had gone wrong, the doctor refused point blank.
Shortly after Robbie's death, Will had asked to see his son's medical records - and, realising their significance, had them witnessed by a local vicar. Seven months later, when he was formally served with the paperwork for the first inquiry into Robbie's death by the West Glamorgan family health service authority, he was alarmed to discover the notes had been changed, and that at least one letter had disappeared. Several years later, forensic tests carried out during an investigation by the Crown Prosecution Service, confirmed that some of the notes had been written at a much later date than the GPs claimed.
What is more, the magistrate who headed the West Glamorgan inquiry has said on record to the police that the GPs lied when giving evidence to the inquiry. Nonetheless, this inquiry concluded the doctors had acted correctly - apart from issuing a verbal warning to Robbie's GP for failing to call an ambulance.
After this, Will recalls months of near-suicidal despair. `Diane carried on with the housework and looking after the boys, thank goodness. I took to the bedroom for weeks on end. `I did nearly lose my mind back then. I was making allegations of dishonesty about the local GPs. That's a difficult position for anyone to be in - and especially someone like me who left school with no qualifications and can't even do joined-up writing.'
The GPs put up a notice in the surgery that claimed that Will's allegations were `distortions and fantasy' - resulting in one of Britain's longest-running defamation trials, concluded in Will's favour just four years ago. Over the next ten years, he contacted every official body he could think of to find out what had happened to his son, and then to find out why nobody would investigate the case. Perhaps the most telling aspect of his epic campaign is that all this time, Will was being viewed as a troublemaker by the official bodies from which he sought help. Under the Data Protection Act, he has found out that the Welsh Ombudsman called him `vindictive', `an alley cat', `a caveman' and `bully'.
Hardly surprising, then, that Will and Diane suffered emotionally. `I've been suicidal on more than one occasion, and our family life all but disappeared,' he says. `My personality changed. I barely went out, and I haven't worked since Robbie died. We've lived on benefits for years and have had to remortgage the house. `I was lucky to have a wonderful wife, who loved Robbie and loved me, and we've managed to stick together. But my relationship with my other two sons has suffered irreparable harm over two decades. Though we can talk now, that damage is permanent.'
What looked like a breakthrough came ten years after Robbie died, in 2000, when an officer from West Midlands police, Detective Chief Inspector Bob Poole, brought in to review the case after intense lobbying by Will, uncovered evidence of gross negligence, forgery and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by the GPs. His recommended charges for the GPs to answer ran to several pages. `It was as though a great weight had been lifted,' says Will. `At long last, someone in authority was seeing these events from the same viewpoint - seeing the truth instead of accepting a mishmash of lies.'
The Crown Prosecution Service refused to press criminal charges on the grounds that the GPs had previously been assured they would not be prosecuted. The doctors also gained support from a High Court ruling that found they had no case to answer in civil law. When Will took this to the Court of Appeal in 1997, Lord Justice Stuart-Smith made the landmark ruling that doctors had no legal obligation to truthfully explain the circumstances of a patient's death to bereaved relatives. `GPs can put a gloss on the cause of death without fear of litigation,' said a GP leader, Dr Brian Goss, at the time. In some cases, honesty can be rather hurtful. You don't necessarily want to point out to a relative that the patient would be alive if they hadn't smoked so much.'
Will appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, but it also ruled that in Britain `doctors do not have to tell the truth or refrain from deliberately falsifying medical records' - implying that they can falsify records without worry. Such a judgment seems incredible - yet the fact is, unlike doctors throughout Europe, there is no duty of candour for British doctors. `This is something few people realise - and yet far too many have experienced it,' says Peter Walsh of the pressure group Action Against Medical Accidents.
In February, Mr Walsh's charity was granted permission for a judicial review that could finally force the GMC to investigate Will's allegations. For the past six years, the GMC has refused to investigate a formal complaint about the Ystradgynlais GPs on the grounds that too much time has elapsed since Robbie's death.
Of course, the vast majority of doctors want to be open and honest, and many senior leaders in the NHS, including the Chief Medical Officer, have called for the medical profession to be obliged by law to tell the truth about any mistakes they make to patients or their relatives,' says Walsh. Until as recently as two weeks ago, the NHS Litigation Authority was still warning doctors that `care needs to be taken in the dissemination of explanations [of what went wrong] so as to avoid future litigation risks'. This advice has only just been withdrawn from the authority's website.
Former King's College surgeon Tony Giddings, chair of the Alliance For The Safety Of Patients, says the culture of denial is a hangover from `the dark ages of medicine when so little could be done and the habit of protecting professionals and their position arose because we didn't know any better. We do now. 'All the evidence from studies around the world has shown the importance of telling the truth if patients are to have a system they can trust, and doctors are to have the confidence of the public.'
Now, a campaign known as Robbie's Law has just been set up by Action Against Medical Accidents to persuade the Government to introduce legislation that requires doctors to inform patients, or their next of kin, of errors or incidents in their healthcare that have caused, or may cause, harm.
For some local people, the fight has gone on too long. When the High Court ruling was reported on the local newspaper website last month, some villagers expressed the view that Will Powell should get on with his life and stop `persecuting' the doctors. `These are people who would complain if the bus was five minutes late,' says Will. `If the doctors had been honest about what had happened, we could all have got on with our lives, however painful Robbie's death. How I wish that could have happened.'
For Will and Diane, at long last there seems a chance of happiness. `We've got three lovely grandchildren, which is a new start, and at least we're talking as a family.' But Will says he will never have a normal life again. `If they'd wanted this to be forgotten and put in the past, the GPs could have told the truth right at the beginning,' he says. `Perhaps it would have helped me to move on, too. `But I'm stuck here, feeling Robbie's death and the injustice of what they did as keenly as ever.'
Dr Keith Hughes, senior partner at the Ystradgynlais group practice, said the GPs had been advised not to make any comment. `We cannot make a statement with all these legal proceedings going on,' he said.
SOURCE
British food industry opposes tougher salt-reduction targets
Food companies are ready to challenge new salt reduction targets, claiming that consumers will not accept the taste of many products. Industry figures say that salt levels set by the Food Standards Agency may also compromise food safety, especially for cheese and ham, which will shorten the shelf life of items in stores and create more food waste.
The agency is demanding a lower salt content for bread, pizza, ready meals and savoury snacks and wants to cut the salt in burgers and grill steaks by 25 per cent. It accepts that many of its targets may be impossible to meet. Thin and frozen burgers are lower in salt than thicker burgers, which require more sodium to bind the ingredients. It is continuing, however, with calls for new recipes and product formulation to try to make 6g of salt a day the maximum average daily intake for an adult.
Health chiefs estimate that 20,200 deaths from high blood pressure and heart disease would be prevented annually if the nation achieved the 6g-a-day average, down from the present average of 8.5g. About 75 per cent of all salt eaten by consumers is in ready-made or processed food.
The agency is also involved in research to test the lowest levels of salt that are needed in some foods so that it can challenge any claims from manufacturers that targets are too difficult.
Rosemary Hignett, head of nutrition at the agency, said that the cooperation of food companies was vital to improve public health. She also said that Britain was leading the way in Europe and beyond in salt reduction. "The reductions which have already been achieved are already saving lives."
The British Retail Consortium, which represents leading supermarkets, said that many of the new targets would be difficult to achieve. Stephen Robertson, its director-general, said: "In some cases we believe customers won't accept the change in taste. It's crucial we take customers with us as tastes don't change overnight. Salt can also play an important part in preserving food. It would be perverse if we reduced salt to the extent that it reduced a product's shelf life and increased food waste - compromising a key part of government food policy."
Bread-makers are particularly concerned that they will not be able to meet the target. Gordon Polson, director of the Federation of Bakers, said: "It is technically impossible for the industry to go beyond the 2010 target of 430mg sodium per 100g to 400mg by 2012."
SOURCE
BBC 'biased in favour of BNP'
We read:
"Searchlight" are far-Leftists of a generally Trotskyist persuasion. It takes someone that mad to see the BBC as favouring an anti-immigrant group. One of them had a go at me back in the '80s, on similarly superficial grounds. See here
At least 10 schools a week are adopting clip-on ties amid fears conventional knots pose an injury risk, it was claimed. Concerns have been raised over children pulling them too tight for a joke and getting them caught in machinery.
Headteachers also claim they look scruffy as pupils wear fat knots or short tails as part of the latest fashion craze.
Research by the Schoolwear Association, which represents uniform manufacturers, said there had been rising demand for "safer" ties since January. Around 25 British schools change their ties every week, it said, with almost half of those opting for clip-ons.
The Campaign for Real Education condemned the move as "health and safety gone mad".
The Schoolwear Association, which surveyed members about the latest uniform "trends" also reported schools adding high visibility and reflective strips to school bags and scarves. The move is designed to improve road safety as children travel to and from school.
In a further development, the association said an "increasing number" of state schools were adopting house systems, which are traditionally associated with the fee-paying sector. They are ordering ties, polo shirts and scarves in house colours to differentiate between pupils, it was disclosed.
SOURCE
The mindlessness and destructiveness of Britain's Left-indoctrinated social workers again
Child abuser placed with young children. Ferals prioritized over decent people again. It's in their training. The middle class are contemptible, they are told. It's "the poor" who must be given every indulgence. And it was that total focus on "the poor" which was at the heart of the events reported below
Three social workers were suspended today after a youth with a history of sexual offences was placed in a home with two young children. The parents were not told of the teenager's troubled history and only discovered that he had been carrying out repeated sexual assaults on their two-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter months later. The 19-year-old was jailed indefinitely earlier this year after admitting raping the boy and sexually assaulting the girl.
Vale of Glamorgan Council in South Wales today apologised "unreservedly" to the family for placing him with them. An investigation overseen by the NSPCC found that social workers had been aware of his history but the information was not passed on when he became an adult. He spent several months living with the family under an adult placement scheme after becoming homeless.
The council's director of social services, Philip Evans, admitted that a serious mistake had been made. He said: "There are no excuses, this should never have happened. Some of our staff did not meet their individual and collective responsibilities for taking action to protect children. "We deeply regret the serious consequences for two young children and for their parents, people who have opened their home to vulnerable adults. We apologise sincerely and will try to make amends."
Social services failed to pass on information about the boy's background and the family had no idea of his history until their daughter told them that he had been assaulting her.
The report said that the youth had been regarded by social workers as a "vulnerable" young man who was himself in need of protection. It stated: "When the teenager became a young adult and staff were hoping him to find accommodation, they concentrated on his vulnerability. "Seen for the most part as a victim in many parts of his life, he was considered to be the one in need of protection. "Because of this focus, much of the relevant information was not made available to the parents of the children and to some of the staff making the decisions about accommodation. As a consequence they were denied the opportunity to take appropriate action to safeguard the children living in the home."
Mr Evans, who has refused to resign, said: "People reading this report will be distressed, shocked and angry at the serious mistakes that were made. They will also be concerned that other children are not made to suffer in this way. "This means facing up to the severe but justifiable criticism in the report to restore public trust in social services. Serious mistakes were made and we offer no excuses. "It is especially sad for us to have let down a family who opened their home on behalf of the community."
The report released today made 12 recommendations for improvement and said that disciplinary action had been started. Mr Evans said that he wants to see the action plan through and added: "This is not a time to be walking away from the problem." The three social services staff who have been suspended have not been identified but could lose their jobs after disciplinary hearings.
At his trial Cardiff Crown Court was told that the youth had a history of sexual offences against children. In 2003 he was accused of "sexually inappropriate behaviour" with a young boy. Two years later he admitted exposing himself and touching another young boy sexually while they were both living at a hostel. He was also dismissed from a job in a bowling alley in 2007 after parents discovered that he was trying to get the telephone numbers of young girls. He became homeless last year after he was accused of indecently assaulting a 16-year-old girl as she slept.
The Cardiff Recorder, Nicholas Cooke, QC, said that it was a matter of "grave concern" how the youth ended up with the family. The teenager was given an indefinite sentence and told that he would be released only when he was considered "no longer a risk". He was ordered to register as a sex offender and banned from working with children for life.
The Recorder said: "In this case a tragedy ensued for a family who only wished to serve the community and who were let down by the system. "They were unable to protect their own children because of a failure to provide them with information."
An NSPCC spokesman said: "We are deeply saddened by this tragic case and the impact on the lives of two young children and their parents. "From the outset the council acknowledged social services had made a serious error of judgement in placing the young man with the family."
Gordon Kemp, Vale of Glamorgan council leader, said that the family had been kept informed of the inquiry and its findings. He praised their "dignity" throughout the ordeal and said that they were "still committed" to the adult placement service. Councillor Kemp said: "It is clear there was a serious error of judgement. We have sought to work with the family to find out what assistance can be given to meet any needs they may have. "It has been an exceptionally difficult time for them. It is especially sad that these tragic events should have befallen a family who provide a service to vulnerable people in need of accommodation."
SOURCE
NHS doctors lied in their teeth to cover up their fatal negligence. But it's OK for doctors to lie and fabricate evidence in socialist Britain
One wonders how much of this goes on -- This only came to light because a father was savvy enough to have a clergyman witness his neglected son's medical records -- before the doctors changed them
By rights, Robbie Powell should have been celebrating his 30th birthday this year - still the apple of his daddy's eye and almost certainly, like his two elder brothers, settled and raising a young family. But 19 years ago he died suddenly, apparently after developing a stomach complaint.
Many parents would have shut themselves away to grieve, but not Robbie's father, Will. He vowed that he would discover what had gone so badly wrong - and has spent the past two decades trying to find out the truth. The effort has all but driven him mad, he says, as he's battled against the cynicism and sheer indifference of officialdom. He's been vilified as a fantasist and his family life has been destroyed - yet he has refused to give up. `The doctors involved believed they could wear me down - that I would give up, as most people eventually give up when making complaints about their doctors,' he says. `But I didn't.'
What he found is truly shocking. Not only did the GPs forge his son's medical notes, but in their attempts to cover up what had happened, they also lied to an inquiry set up into Robbie's death. Mr Powell's investigation also unravelled a truly horrifying fact. For the story of the boy who never grew up has exposed British doctors' best-kept secret - that they are under no legal obligation to tell the truth to a patient's family about the circumstances surrounding a death. Indeed, it is not even clear whether doctors can be prosecuted for falsifying patients' records.
This lack of legal obligation to tell the truth is unique in the developed world, and it may well have continued to go unnoticed were it not for Will Powell.
It would be difficult to overstate the terrier-like persistence with which the 55-year-old former car mechanic has painstakingly unpicked the doctors' version of the events surrounding the death of his darling boy. At his semi-detached house in the small Welsh town of Ystradgynlais, near Swansea, he sits surrounded by a pile of meticulously ordered files and copies of the 2,000 and more letters he has written to the authorities.
He has turned for help to every relevant state organisation - beginning with a ten-year battle to get the coroner to hold an inquest into his son's death, and involving local professional disciplinary bodies, civil courts, the European Court of Human Rights, the Welsh Office, the police and the General Medical Council (GMC).
What makes this story so alarming is that it exposes just how impotent families are when faced with doctors determined to cover up mistakes. Twenty years ago, the Powells were a happy, carefree family. Will, a Glaswegian, had moved to Ystradgynlais as a young man and married a Welsh girl, Diane. He became a keen angler and member of the local darts team, raising his three boys - Robbie, Justin, now 33, and Ian, 31 - in `an ordinary, working-class home where we worked hard to keep a roof over the boys' heads'. Robbie was a popular, happy, outgoing little boy - `Someone who made you feel loved and special,' recalls his father.
None of the children had ever had a serious illness until December 1989, when Robbie suffered a bout of stomach pain and vomiting that was so bad he was admitted to Morriston Hospital, Swansea. It later emerged that at least one hospital doctor suspected what proved to be true, that Robbie had Addison's disease - a rare, but highly treatable disease of the adrenal glands - but he failed to tell Will and Diane, or to conduct the test that would have confirmed it. The hospital has since acknowledged this doctor was negligent.
However, it is what then happened in the weeks immediately before and after Robbie's death that is most disturbing. Over three weeks, as the ten-year-old suffered vomiting, weight loss and stomach pains, he was seen seven times by five GPs from the local surgery. It has since been established that only one GP considered referring the boy back to hospital, but never did so. The others did not read the boy's notes, perform a blood test or even take his blood pressure. One tried to test his blood sugar, but found his kit was out of date. None recognised that they were dealing with a very sick boy in need of urgent transfer to hospital - instead telling his distraught parents there was nothing wrong with him.
In the final two days of his life, two of the five GPs saw Robbie, but failed to refer him to hospital - even though, at the time, he could not walk and was severely dehydrated. The afternoon of his death,15 days after he'd first fallen ill, a third GP was called to his house after he had been carried to the bathroom by his mother, where he collapsed, his lips blue and his pupils dilated.
`We didn't know it at the time, but he was already dying,' says Will. Yet the GP told the family that a throat infection diagnosed the day before had spread to his chest, and refused to refer him to hospital. When the parents called the surgery again an hour later, the GP returned, but refused again to send Robbie to hospital, had an argument with Will, relented, scribbled a referral note and walked angrily out of the house - leaving the parents to drive their son to hospital.
`I remember telling Robbie over and over again to stay awake because I didn't want the doctors to think he was just sleepy,' says Will. In fact, his son was lapsing in and out of consciousness. When the family arrived at the hospital, staff immediately called the crash team. As they later told the family, Robbie was `desperately ill and close to death' and `looked like someone from a concentration camp' because he was so dehydrated. He died as they tried to revive him.
Will grasped quite quickly that his son's death could have been avoided. `Addison's disease prevents the adrenal glands from pumping vital hormones around the body, reducing blood pressure and eventually causing a heart attack. `It's like a car running out of petrol - and I knew well enough from my knowledge of engines that the damage could have been halted.' Indeed, hydrocortisone and intravenous fluids can bring an emergency Addison's disease patient back to normal health in less than an hour.
`I extended my compassion to the GPs who had let my son die. I felt they must be suffering, too,' says Will. `But I think they misunderstood. I believe they saw me as someone with no education and thought I posed no risk to their reputations.' When he asked the senior partner to carry out an investigation into what had gone wrong, the doctor refused point blank.
Shortly after Robbie's death, Will had asked to see his son's medical records - and, realising their significance, had them witnessed by a local vicar. Seven months later, when he was formally served with the paperwork for the first inquiry into Robbie's death by the West Glamorgan family health service authority, he was alarmed to discover the notes had been changed, and that at least one letter had disappeared. Several years later, forensic tests carried out during an investigation by the Crown Prosecution Service, confirmed that some of the notes had been written at a much later date than the GPs claimed.
What is more, the magistrate who headed the West Glamorgan inquiry has said on record to the police that the GPs lied when giving evidence to the inquiry. Nonetheless, this inquiry concluded the doctors had acted correctly - apart from issuing a verbal warning to Robbie's GP for failing to call an ambulance.
After this, Will recalls months of near-suicidal despair. `Diane carried on with the housework and looking after the boys, thank goodness. I took to the bedroom for weeks on end. `I did nearly lose my mind back then. I was making allegations of dishonesty about the local GPs. That's a difficult position for anyone to be in - and especially someone like me who left school with no qualifications and can't even do joined-up writing.'
The GPs put up a notice in the surgery that claimed that Will's allegations were `distortions and fantasy' - resulting in one of Britain's longest-running defamation trials, concluded in Will's favour just four years ago. Over the next ten years, he contacted every official body he could think of to find out what had happened to his son, and then to find out why nobody would investigate the case. Perhaps the most telling aspect of his epic campaign is that all this time, Will was being viewed as a troublemaker by the official bodies from which he sought help. Under the Data Protection Act, he has found out that the Welsh Ombudsman called him `vindictive', `an alley cat', `a caveman' and `bully'.
Hardly surprising, then, that Will and Diane suffered emotionally. `I've been suicidal on more than one occasion, and our family life all but disappeared,' he says. `My personality changed. I barely went out, and I haven't worked since Robbie died. We've lived on benefits for years and have had to remortgage the house. `I was lucky to have a wonderful wife, who loved Robbie and loved me, and we've managed to stick together. But my relationship with my other two sons has suffered irreparable harm over two decades. Though we can talk now, that damage is permanent.'
What looked like a breakthrough came ten years after Robbie died, in 2000, when an officer from West Midlands police, Detective Chief Inspector Bob Poole, brought in to review the case after intense lobbying by Will, uncovered evidence of gross negligence, forgery and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by the GPs. His recommended charges for the GPs to answer ran to several pages. `It was as though a great weight had been lifted,' says Will. `At long last, someone in authority was seeing these events from the same viewpoint - seeing the truth instead of accepting a mishmash of lies.'
The Crown Prosecution Service refused to press criminal charges on the grounds that the GPs had previously been assured they would not be prosecuted. The doctors also gained support from a High Court ruling that found they had no case to answer in civil law. When Will took this to the Court of Appeal in 1997, Lord Justice Stuart-Smith made the landmark ruling that doctors had no legal obligation to truthfully explain the circumstances of a patient's death to bereaved relatives. `GPs can put a gloss on the cause of death without fear of litigation,' said a GP leader, Dr Brian Goss, at the time. In some cases, honesty can be rather hurtful. You don't necessarily want to point out to a relative that the patient would be alive if they hadn't smoked so much.'
Will appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, but it also ruled that in Britain `doctors do not have to tell the truth or refrain from deliberately falsifying medical records' - implying that they can falsify records without worry. Such a judgment seems incredible - yet the fact is, unlike doctors throughout Europe, there is no duty of candour for British doctors. `This is something few people realise - and yet far too many have experienced it,' says Peter Walsh of the pressure group Action Against Medical Accidents.
In February, Mr Walsh's charity was granted permission for a judicial review that could finally force the GMC to investigate Will's allegations. For the past six years, the GMC has refused to investigate a formal complaint about the Ystradgynlais GPs on the grounds that too much time has elapsed since Robbie's death.
Of course, the vast majority of doctors want to be open and honest, and many senior leaders in the NHS, including the Chief Medical Officer, have called for the medical profession to be obliged by law to tell the truth about any mistakes they make to patients or their relatives,' says Walsh. Until as recently as two weeks ago, the NHS Litigation Authority was still warning doctors that `care needs to be taken in the dissemination of explanations [of what went wrong] so as to avoid future litigation risks'. This advice has only just been withdrawn from the authority's website.
Former King's College surgeon Tony Giddings, chair of the Alliance For The Safety Of Patients, says the culture of denial is a hangover from `the dark ages of medicine when so little could be done and the habit of protecting professionals and their position arose because we didn't know any better. We do now. 'All the evidence from studies around the world has shown the importance of telling the truth if patients are to have a system they can trust, and doctors are to have the confidence of the public.'
Now, a campaign known as Robbie's Law has just been set up by Action Against Medical Accidents to persuade the Government to introduce legislation that requires doctors to inform patients, or their next of kin, of errors or incidents in their healthcare that have caused, or may cause, harm.
For some local people, the fight has gone on too long. When the High Court ruling was reported on the local newspaper website last month, some villagers expressed the view that Will Powell should get on with his life and stop `persecuting' the doctors. `These are people who would complain if the bus was five minutes late,' says Will. `If the doctors had been honest about what had happened, we could all have got on with our lives, however painful Robbie's death. How I wish that could have happened.'
For Will and Diane, at long last there seems a chance of happiness. `We've got three lovely grandchildren, which is a new start, and at least we're talking as a family.' But Will says he will never have a normal life again. `If they'd wanted this to be forgotten and put in the past, the GPs could have told the truth right at the beginning,' he says. `Perhaps it would have helped me to move on, too. `But I'm stuck here, feeling Robbie's death and the injustice of what they did as keenly as ever.'
Dr Keith Hughes, senior partner at the Ystradgynlais group practice, said the GPs had been advised not to make any comment. `We cannot make a statement with all these legal proceedings going on,' he said.
SOURCE
British food industry opposes tougher salt-reduction targets
Food companies are ready to challenge new salt reduction targets, claiming that consumers will not accept the taste of many products. Industry figures say that salt levels set by the Food Standards Agency may also compromise food safety, especially for cheese and ham, which will shorten the shelf life of items in stores and create more food waste.
The agency is demanding a lower salt content for bread, pizza, ready meals and savoury snacks and wants to cut the salt in burgers and grill steaks by 25 per cent. It accepts that many of its targets may be impossible to meet. Thin and frozen burgers are lower in salt than thicker burgers, which require more sodium to bind the ingredients. It is continuing, however, with calls for new recipes and product formulation to try to make 6g of salt a day the maximum average daily intake for an adult.
Health chiefs estimate that 20,200 deaths from high blood pressure and heart disease would be prevented annually if the nation achieved the 6g-a-day average, down from the present average of 8.5g. About 75 per cent of all salt eaten by consumers is in ready-made or processed food.
The agency is also involved in research to test the lowest levels of salt that are needed in some foods so that it can challenge any claims from manufacturers that targets are too difficult.
Rosemary Hignett, head of nutrition at the agency, said that the cooperation of food companies was vital to improve public health. She also said that Britain was leading the way in Europe and beyond in salt reduction. "The reductions which have already been achieved are already saving lives."
The British Retail Consortium, which represents leading supermarkets, said that many of the new targets would be difficult to achieve. Stephen Robertson, its director-general, said: "In some cases we believe customers won't accept the change in taste. It's crucial we take customers with us as tastes don't change overnight. Salt can also play an important part in preserving food. It would be perverse if we reduced salt to the extent that it reduced a product's shelf life and increased food waste - compromising a key part of government food policy."
Bread-makers are particularly concerned that they will not be able to meet the target. Gordon Polson, director of the Federation of Bakers, said: "It is technically impossible for the industry to go beyond the 2010 target of 430mg sodium per 100g to 400mg by 2012."
SOURCE
BBC 'biased in favour of BNP'
We read:
"The BBC was last night plunged into a row over claims of "disgraceful" bias in favour of the British National Party.
Anti-fascist campaigners Searchlight launched a formal complaint with BBC director general Mark Thompson after a series of broadcasts which, the organisation said, broke strict election rules on impartiality. Searchlight said the BBC was claiming the BNP were the main beneficiaries of the "anti-politics" sentiment caused by the MPs expenses scandal, when in fact the UK Independence Party and the Greens were ahead of the far-right party in the polls.
A BBC spokesman said the corporation "is obliged to treat all political parties... with due impartiality" and said the BBC "strongly contest" Searchlight's allegations.
Source
"Searchlight" are far-Leftists of a generally Trotskyist persuasion. It takes someone that mad to see the BBC as favouring an anti-immigrant group. One of them had a go at me back in the '80s, on similarly superficial grounds. See here
Monday, May 18, 2009
The British hunting ban: a dead law
Thank God for our sensible police forces. At a time when our parliament is in complete disarray, the Association of Chief Police Officers has announced that the ban on hunting is hard to enforce and chief constables have more pressing priorities.
To force the ban through, more than 700 hours of parliamentary time and the Parliament Act were used to introduce a ridiculous and badly drafted bill. Since then there have been eight prosecutions of hunts, of which only three have been successful. Tony Wright, a huntsman in Devon, was in 2006 found guilty of illegal hunting by a district judge at Barnstaple magistrates' court in a private prosecution taken out by the League Against Cruel Sports. After 3« years, his case ended up in the High Court and he was acquitted.
The judgment interpreted the muddled law in such a way that two other prosecutions were dropped. If the courts can't decide how to deal with this law, how can the police be expected to do so? There have been scenes of high comedy, with packs of hounds, huntsmen, saboteurs and policemen chasing each other round England's pastures green.
There are 325 registered hunts in England and Wales and, as a result of the publicity engendered by the ban, more people than ever before are today following them, on foot or on horses or in cars. The police know that 99.9% of them are decent, law-abiding citizens who hold no brief for cruelty to animals.
The truth is that when this law came about Tony Blair, then prime minister, and other middle-of-the-road new Labour bigwigs had no real interest in banning hunting. Indeed, I had always wondered if the 1.1m they received from animal rights organisations, including the Political Animal Lobby, influenced their policy. A hunting ban was a bone to be thrown to their tiresome backbench dogs, many of whom saw it as "a revenge for the miners", assuming that everyone who followed hounds was a signed-up Tory toff who had cheered for Margaret Thatcher when she closed down the mines.
I went to Wales before the ban and met former miners who said their jobs had been taken away from them, they couldn't afford to go on holiday, no leisure centres had been built for them and now the powers-that-be wanted to take away hunting, their only pastime and pleasure.
By contrast, the zealots of the animal rights movement were delighted when the ban came into effect. In the 1990s I helped to run an organisation called Leave Country Sports Alone which represented members and supporters of the Labour party who objected to the proposed bill. I received through the post not only razor blades stuck to the inside of an envelope, but also excrement - whether human or otherwise I didn't care to investigate - which Terry, our poor postman, was required by law to deliver, even though the package had broken open en route. I also received anonymous letters with such messages as "I hope your balls drop off (if you have any) and your fannies shrivel and dry up" and "I hope you get cancer and die a slow and painful death. Yours sincerely a well wisher".
Earlier this year a supporter of the Warwickshire hunt was killed by a gyrocopter that had been used by anti-hunt "monitors" to follow the hunt for some weeks. A man linked to a local animal rights group, Protect Our Wild Animals, has been charged with murder and is now awaiting trial.
Animal rights "monitors" must be instructed firmly that it is the role of the police, and no one else, to uphold the law. Activists cannot appoint themselves to police hunting any more than other citizens can appoint themselves to police any other law.
The Hunting Act has done nothing to improve animal welfare but has, in fact, harmed it. The rights and wrongs of hunting have been debated ad nauseam for decades. It has to be accepted that legislation cannot change the predatory instincts of foxes or the views of farmers who seek to protect their pigs, sheep and poultry. In places where there is now no hunting, such as over National Trust land, the fox population is contained by trapping or shooting or worse. It is an utter fallacy to believe that shooting involves less suffering for foxes than hunting. Many people argue that it would be better for the welfare of the fox if there were more hunting taking place than at present.
There are no reasonable arguments left for retaining the Hunting Act. Bad laws should be repealed and this is a very bad law. David Cameron said about it last year: "It's quite clear it isn't working. There are more people hunting than ever before. The law is being made to look an idiot and that isn't a good situation to be in. We have a very clear position on this: there will be a free vote and if there is a vote to repeal the hunting ban, there will be a government bill in government time."
For the sake of our overburdened policemen, trying to foil terrorist plots, solve knife crime and keep the traffic moving, let's hope he is one politician who will stick to his word.
SOURCE
Hate-filled Leftist bigotry in Britain
Bigotry, like poverty, is always with us. It is not often in this country that you come across open, unselfconsciously brutal bigotry, but it is always there somewhere, lurking in the most respectable of places, and sometimes it drops its mask and bares its vicious teeth.
Twice last week I was astonished by glimpses of this vindictive grimace. I had begun to think this country was largely free of the ideological hatred and class war that so disfigured it in the 1960s and 1970s. Even the ban on foxhunting has failed. But now I realise that impression is all too superficial. Bigotry will out, and it wants to condemn, punish and control. It is the mindset of the totalitarian.
The Guardian published a column by Zoe Williams on Tuesday that ought to make any right-minded person gasp with shock, no matter what his or her political views. Quite a few Guardian readers were indeed shocked, to judge by their comments online. Williams was discussing the fact that many parents who would prefer to send their children to private schools - she calls them privateers - are obliged by the economic slump to send them to state schools. Her view is that the children of such privateers should be forced to the bottom of the waiting lists for state primary schools.
Never mind, she says, whether such children are "swamping" state primaries, or might do in the future, or not at all: this has nothing to do with the availability of school places and everything to do with ideology - such children must be put at the back of the queue. Her view, unpleasant though it is, might be worth rational discussion. But Williams's tone is far from rational. It is frightening. She writes like an old-fashioned class warrior who believes children must be punished for the class guilt of their parents, and if that sounds vindictive, she admits she means it to. "Ha! Good," she exclaims unselfconsciously.
Perhaps this is an opportune moment to point out that Williams was privately educated at the expensive and selective Godolphin and Latymer school in west London, which no doubt helped her to get a place at Oxford and a job at The Guardian; should she, too, be punished for the class crimes of her parents in educating her privately? Which queue should Williams be shoved to the back of to atone for her inherited class guilt?
What horrifies me more than her general approach is the totalitarian detail in which she indulges her class hatred. Her list of exclusion for privateers' children is precisely graded. To the bottom she dispatches those who have been recently removed from private schools; "above them but below everybody else" should be children with siblings at private schools; and somewhere near them should be children whose parents' first choice was a faith school.
It reminded me at once of the careful protocols of Nazi selection systems, or the elaborate plans put forward by Stalinists and Maoists; it reads like those chilling, heart-rending accounts of life in the USSR and communist China, from Solzhenitsyn to Jung Chang.
"There are other questions", Williams goes on, apparently ignorant of similar interrogations during the worst of 20th-century totalitarianism, that "an admissions process could use to whittle out privateers. Do they have a 4x4? Can parents provide a letter from any local left-wing organisation attesting to their commitment to open-access state education? Did they go to any meetings? . . . come on, you lefties . . . what happened to your sharp elbows?" I rest my case. This is hate speech, class war and political bigotry of the most vicious sort. What is one to make of the suggestion that "local left-wing organisations" should stand in judgment on parents and their thoughts?
Just as astonishing was a comment made in a guide to adoption published by a state-funded national agency, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. Its new booklet, the Pink Guide to Adoption for Lesbians and Gay Men, describes people who oppose gay adoption as "retarded homophobes". The association repeated this choice phrase on its Be My Parent website, although it has since been removed. This again was a shocking glimpse of the unmasked teeth of vicious bigotry, made even worse by unselfconscious hypocrisy.
"Retarded" is a word that no decent person would now use to describe another. It was a cruel and largely American expression for people with intellectual impairments. For years it has been considered inaccurate, ignorant and offensive and demeaning to people with learning disabilities.
I find it amazing that anyone would use it at all, let alone in public or in print, let alone the people in the adoption association, which is about as politically correct as an organisation can be, and still less in a booklet aimed at a minority that has good reason to notice and resent demeaning words. It seems the phrase was written by a contributor, not by the association, but that is no excuse - the word "retarded" should have leapt out at those responsible for producing the booklet.
And how much worse it is to use the word "retarded" as a conscious insult. How can any outfit subsidised by the taxpayer and run by the supposedly politically correct use any disability as an insult? And how much worse again it is to use such bizarre insults against people to discredit their arguments and their beliefs. Does the association think that people who disagree with it are, ipso facto, "retards"? Is disagreement with it a sign of cognitive impairment? Does it perhaps think that people who disagree are not merely mentally handicapped (in another old-fashioned expression) but mentally ill as well, in need of locking up in an insane asylum as in totalitarian countries?
Whether people who oppose gay adoption are right or wrong is not the point. I happen to think they are wrong, but it will not do to dismiss their arguments with insults - insults that are not only offensive to them but also even more insulting to innocent bystanders. I am glad, however, that these bigots have done so, because those who wrote these words and published them and publicised them on the internet have revealed themselves in their true colours.
For the same reason I am glad that Williams felt free to publish her spiteful rant and that The Guardian printed it. By their words shall ye know them. That is one of the great beauties of free speech. If we must have bigots and totalitarians in our midst, it is good to know who they are and what they think, so we can beware of them.
SOURCE
Britain: The battle to find a good school
They cheat. They lie. They give a false address. . . No, not our MPs - just parents trying to find a decent school for their children, finds Julia Llewellyn Smith. Many of Britain's "sink" government schools would make any responsible parent quail
The letter was a shock. "Dear parent/guardian, Thank you for your primary-school application for the 2009/2010 school year. I am sorry to inform you that we are unable to offer you a place at any of your preferred schools."
I didn't think I'd asked for too much. With my eldest daughter, Sasha, due to start reception in September, I'd applied to my nearest state primary school. We live in the wealthy borough of Richmond, west London, and until this year the school had always been undersubscribed with most neighbours choosing to send their children private from the age of four.
However, we were impressed by the school's new, glowing Ofsted report, by the dynamic head and its happy, motivated children. We applied, congratulating ourselves on the fees we'd save, delighted our children would be able to walk to school and enjoy a circle of local friends.
We were far from alone. Everywhere, job-fearing parents, shocked at extortionate school fees, have decided to chance the state system. "Oxbridge favours state applicants," they convince each other. "We don't want our children to grow up in a privileged ghetto." The result is school places everywhere are being pursued as hotly as premier-league footballers in a nightclub. Two thirds of local authorities have reported a surge in primary-school applications, while the number of children aged five to seven in classes bigger than the legal limit of 30 has risen to 10,010, more than double the 2007 figure of 4,280.
At secondary level, 92,000 children have been denied their first choice of school, while 30,000 have been offered none anywhere. Official figures for primary schools have not yet been published, but a huge shortfall of places is reported in, among others, Birmingham, Bristol and Surrey. In London, 25 out of 33 boroughs are unable to cope with demand.
To win an elusive place, parents are using tactics that make Machiavelli look like Snow White. "These are extreme times and they push people into extreme measures," says Janette Wallis, an editor of the Good Schools Guide. "People have always been willing to stretch the truth for a good school. There's no question we are seeing the most highly driven parents, who would have done anything to get their children in a private school in normal times, use the same dedication and drive to get them into a good state school."
Last week, Harrow Council, in north-west London, said that it was prosecuting Mranil Patel for fraud, after she pretended she lived at her mother's address to win her son a place at a popular school. In fact, Mrs Patel was living at her husband's house two miles away. She claimed she was living at her mother's during a brief split with her husband, but reconciled with him shortly after the school's application deadline. If found guilty, she risks a fine of up to 5,000 - or a prison sentence.
Outwardly, parents tutted; secretly, many felt: "There but for the grace of God." A recent YouGov survey showed that one in four parents would lie or cheat to win a school place. Since many are as coy about their deviousness as Hollywood starlets are about Botox, the real figure is probably higher.
In my madder moments, I have plotted how my husband and I could "separate" so I could temporarily move into a flat near a sought-after girls' comprehensive. Once Sasha's place was won (guaranteeing her sister's), we'd "reconcile". My more scrupulous husband will not consent, however; just as he refused to find God (we are both atheists) in order to get Sasha into the Ofsted-rated "outstanding" church primary yards from the house we used to live in.
Other parents had no such qualms. On Sundays, the ugly church at which they were required to worship three out of four Sundays a month for at least a year to secure a place, was surrounded by double-parked four-by-fours driven from as far as 10 miles away. The outfits and air-kissing on the pavement outside reminded me of Henley. "Of course the vicar knows most of us are agnostics at best," says Jane, who has three children at the school, despite living six miles away, and is a secret atheist. "His attitude is so long as there are bums on seats, who cares? We're all frantically volunteering for Sunday school, organising bake sales and having him over for drinks to keep him onside. It's totally hypocritical and everyone's in on it."
After all, an example is set from on high. No one doubts Tony Blair's or David Cameron's faith, but both shunned local primaries for their children in favour of distant church schools.
Other common ploys include having children "statemented" for special needs, which gives them priority in many entrance policies. "My child's a bit of a tearaway, but with the help of an educational psychologist, we're hoping to transform it into serious dyslexia and ADHD so he can get into ------," a neighbour cheerfully told me recently. Some put the "wrong" postcode with a correct address, knowing councils use the postcode to measure distance between home and school. If they are detected, they claim a slip of the pen. Others forge necessary council tax documents.
Some stay within the limits, if not the spirit, of the law by buying or renting a second home, or even a caravan, as close as possible (since catchments change from year to year) to their preferred school gates. Recently, John Burton, chair of governors of St Peter's, Eaton Square, a C of E primary much loved by politicians' children, admitted his family had twice moved into rented accommodation, while keeping his original home, to win his daughter a place at popular church secondary schools. "Parents pay money [for private schools] and everyone thinks that's fine, yet people think it's odd we'd want to move to stay in the state sector," he said, defending himself.
Parents in Devon, a grammar [selective school] hot spot, report an influx of pupils from as far as London, who live in their parents' second homes in term time and return to the capital for holidays.
Schools are fighting back with councils such as Poole using measures to spy on possible cheats. Friends of mine who have applied to church schools have got used to the vicar "unexpectedly" dropping in to check they are actually living at the address on their application forms. These vicars also demand to see parents' Baptism certificates and quiz children on the intricacies of their alleged faith.
Fiona Millar, partner of Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell and vice-chairwoman of Comprehensive Futures, an organisation that lobbies for fair admissions, says it's unfair to blame parents for wanting the best for their children. "The Government has set schools up as a market, so people are automatically going to gravitate to what they perceive to be the best. But the problem with creating a marketplace is you need complete elasticity of supply and demand. It works for baked beans when if more people want them you can produce more, but you can't magically conjure up more school places in a crisis year like this."
After years of pious hectoring by the likes of Millar about supporting the state system, I am more than a little disillusioned to discover that option is not practically available. The council is legally obliged to find Sasha a place, but with the five nearest schools to me oversubscribed, the one they will eventually offer seems certain to be miles away.
So Sasha's going to a private prep school. As for secondary school, I wonder if the vicar needs help with the flower rota? Or maybe I'll call the divorce lawyers after all.
SOURCE
Accusations of effeminacy wrong?
British TV star Jonathan Ross is in trouble again:
He obviously implied that a parent might be disappointed if their son brought home a homosexual lover but that is probably a pretty accurate judgment about how most parents would react. But truth-telling is a low priority in Britain.
Thank God for our sensible police forces. At a time when our parliament is in complete disarray, the Association of Chief Police Officers has announced that the ban on hunting is hard to enforce and chief constables have more pressing priorities.
To force the ban through, more than 700 hours of parliamentary time and the Parliament Act were used to introduce a ridiculous and badly drafted bill. Since then there have been eight prosecutions of hunts, of which only three have been successful. Tony Wright, a huntsman in Devon, was in 2006 found guilty of illegal hunting by a district judge at Barnstaple magistrates' court in a private prosecution taken out by the League Against Cruel Sports. After 3« years, his case ended up in the High Court and he was acquitted.
The judgment interpreted the muddled law in such a way that two other prosecutions were dropped. If the courts can't decide how to deal with this law, how can the police be expected to do so? There have been scenes of high comedy, with packs of hounds, huntsmen, saboteurs and policemen chasing each other round England's pastures green.
There are 325 registered hunts in England and Wales and, as a result of the publicity engendered by the ban, more people than ever before are today following them, on foot or on horses or in cars. The police know that 99.9% of them are decent, law-abiding citizens who hold no brief for cruelty to animals.
The truth is that when this law came about Tony Blair, then prime minister, and other middle-of-the-road new Labour bigwigs had no real interest in banning hunting. Indeed, I had always wondered if the 1.1m they received from animal rights organisations, including the Political Animal Lobby, influenced their policy. A hunting ban was a bone to be thrown to their tiresome backbench dogs, many of whom saw it as "a revenge for the miners", assuming that everyone who followed hounds was a signed-up Tory toff who had cheered for Margaret Thatcher when she closed down the mines.
I went to Wales before the ban and met former miners who said their jobs had been taken away from them, they couldn't afford to go on holiday, no leisure centres had been built for them and now the powers-that-be wanted to take away hunting, their only pastime and pleasure.
By contrast, the zealots of the animal rights movement were delighted when the ban came into effect. In the 1990s I helped to run an organisation called Leave Country Sports Alone which represented members and supporters of the Labour party who objected to the proposed bill. I received through the post not only razor blades stuck to the inside of an envelope, but also excrement - whether human or otherwise I didn't care to investigate - which Terry, our poor postman, was required by law to deliver, even though the package had broken open en route. I also received anonymous letters with such messages as "I hope your balls drop off (if you have any) and your fannies shrivel and dry up" and "I hope you get cancer and die a slow and painful death. Yours sincerely a well wisher".
Earlier this year a supporter of the Warwickshire hunt was killed by a gyrocopter that had been used by anti-hunt "monitors" to follow the hunt for some weeks. A man linked to a local animal rights group, Protect Our Wild Animals, has been charged with murder and is now awaiting trial.
Animal rights "monitors" must be instructed firmly that it is the role of the police, and no one else, to uphold the law. Activists cannot appoint themselves to police hunting any more than other citizens can appoint themselves to police any other law.
The Hunting Act has done nothing to improve animal welfare but has, in fact, harmed it. The rights and wrongs of hunting have been debated ad nauseam for decades. It has to be accepted that legislation cannot change the predatory instincts of foxes or the views of farmers who seek to protect their pigs, sheep and poultry. In places where there is now no hunting, such as over National Trust land, the fox population is contained by trapping or shooting or worse. It is an utter fallacy to believe that shooting involves less suffering for foxes than hunting. Many people argue that it would be better for the welfare of the fox if there were more hunting taking place than at present.
There are no reasonable arguments left for retaining the Hunting Act. Bad laws should be repealed and this is a very bad law. David Cameron said about it last year: "It's quite clear it isn't working. There are more people hunting than ever before. The law is being made to look an idiot and that isn't a good situation to be in. We have a very clear position on this: there will be a free vote and if there is a vote to repeal the hunting ban, there will be a government bill in government time."
For the sake of our overburdened policemen, trying to foil terrorist plots, solve knife crime and keep the traffic moving, let's hope he is one politician who will stick to his word.
SOURCE
Hate-filled Leftist bigotry in Britain
Bigotry, like poverty, is always with us. It is not often in this country that you come across open, unselfconsciously brutal bigotry, but it is always there somewhere, lurking in the most respectable of places, and sometimes it drops its mask and bares its vicious teeth.
Twice last week I was astonished by glimpses of this vindictive grimace. I had begun to think this country was largely free of the ideological hatred and class war that so disfigured it in the 1960s and 1970s. Even the ban on foxhunting has failed. But now I realise that impression is all too superficial. Bigotry will out, and it wants to condemn, punish and control. It is the mindset of the totalitarian.
The Guardian published a column by Zoe Williams on Tuesday that ought to make any right-minded person gasp with shock, no matter what his or her political views. Quite a few Guardian readers were indeed shocked, to judge by their comments online. Williams was discussing the fact that many parents who would prefer to send their children to private schools - she calls them privateers - are obliged by the economic slump to send them to state schools. Her view is that the children of such privateers should be forced to the bottom of the waiting lists for state primary schools.
Never mind, she says, whether such children are "swamping" state primaries, or might do in the future, or not at all: this has nothing to do with the availability of school places and everything to do with ideology - such children must be put at the back of the queue. Her view, unpleasant though it is, might be worth rational discussion. But Williams's tone is far from rational. It is frightening. She writes like an old-fashioned class warrior who believes children must be punished for the class guilt of their parents, and if that sounds vindictive, she admits she means it to. "Ha! Good," she exclaims unselfconsciously.
Perhaps this is an opportune moment to point out that Williams was privately educated at the expensive and selective Godolphin and Latymer school in west London, which no doubt helped her to get a place at Oxford and a job at The Guardian; should she, too, be punished for the class crimes of her parents in educating her privately? Which queue should Williams be shoved to the back of to atone for her inherited class guilt?
What horrifies me more than her general approach is the totalitarian detail in which she indulges her class hatred. Her list of exclusion for privateers' children is precisely graded. To the bottom she dispatches those who have been recently removed from private schools; "above them but below everybody else" should be children with siblings at private schools; and somewhere near them should be children whose parents' first choice was a faith school.
It reminded me at once of the careful protocols of Nazi selection systems, or the elaborate plans put forward by Stalinists and Maoists; it reads like those chilling, heart-rending accounts of life in the USSR and communist China, from Solzhenitsyn to Jung Chang.
"There are other questions", Williams goes on, apparently ignorant of similar interrogations during the worst of 20th-century totalitarianism, that "an admissions process could use to whittle out privateers. Do they have a 4x4? Can parents provide a letter from any local left-wing organisation attesting to their commitment to open-access state education? Did they go to any meetings? . . . come on, you lefties . . . what happened to your sharp elbows?" I rest my case. This is hate speech, class war and political bigotry of the most vicious sort. What is one to make of the suggestion that "local left-wing organisations" should stand in judgment on parents and their thoughts?
Just as astonishing was a comment made in a guide to adoption published by a state-funded national agency, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. Its new booklet, the Pink Guide to Adoption for Lesbians and Gay Men, describes people who oppose gay adoption as "retarded homophobes". The association repeated this choice phrase on its Be My Parent website, although it has since been removed. This again was a shocking glimpse of the unmasked teeth of vicious bigotry, made even worse by unselfconscious hypocrisy.
"Retarded" is a word that no decent person would now use to describe another. It was a cruel and largely American expression for people with intellectual impairments. For years it has been considered inaccurate, ignorant and offensive and demeaning to people with learning disabilities.
I find it amazing that anyone would use it at all, let alone in public or in print, let alone the people in the adoption association, which is about as politically correct as an organisation can be, and still less in a booklet aimed at a minority that has good reason to notice and resent demeaning words. It seems the phrase was written by a contributor, not by the association, but that is no excuse - the word "retarded" should have leapt out at those responsible for producing the booklet.
And how much worse it is to use the word "retarded" as a conscious insult. How can any outfit subsidised by the taxpayer and run by the supposedly politically correct use any disability as an insult? And how much worse again it is to use such bizarre insults against people to discredit their arguments and their beliefs. Does the association think that people who disagree with it are, ipso facto, "retards"? Is disagreement with it a sign of cognitive impairment? Does it perhaps think that people who disagree are not merely mentally handicapped (in another old-fashioned expression) but mentally ill as well, in need of locking up in an insane asylum as in totalitarian countries?
Whether people who oppose gay adoption are right or wrong is not the point. I happen to think they are wrong, but it will not do to dismiss their arguments with insults - insults that are not only offensive to them but also even more insulting to innocent bystanders. I am glad, however, that these bigots have done so, because those who wrote these words and published them and publicised them on the internet have revealed themselves in their true colours.
For the same reason I am glad that Williams felt free to publish her spiteful rant and that The Guardian printed it. By their words shall ye know them. That is one of the great beauties of free speech. If we must have bigots and totalitarians in our midst, it is good to know who they are and what they think, so we can beware of them.
SOURCE
Britain: The battle to find a good school
They cheat. They lie. They give a false address. . . No, not our MPs - just parents trying to find a decent school for their children, finds Julia Llewellyn Smith. Many of Britain's "sink" government schools would make any responsible parent quail
The letter was a shock. "Dear parent/guardian, Thank you for your primary-school application for the 2009/2010 school year. I am sorry to inform you that we are unable to offer you a place at any of your preferred schools."
I didn't think I'd asked for too much. With my eldest daughter, Sasha, due to start reception in September, I'd applied to my nearest state primary school. We live in the wealthy borough of Richmond, west London, and until this year the school had always been undersubscribed with most neighbours choosing to send their children private from the age of four.
However, we were impressed by the school's new, glowing Ofsted report, by the dynamic head and its happy, motivated children. We applied, congratulating ourselves on the fees we'd save, delighted our children would be able to walk to school and enjoy a circle of local friends.
We were far from alone. Everywhere, job-fearing parents, shocked at extortionate school fees, have decided to chance the state system. "Oxbridge favours state applicants," they convince each other. "We don't want our children to grow up in a privileged ghetto." The result is school places everywhere are being pursued as hotly as premier-league footballers in a nightclub. Two thirds of local authorities have reported a surge in primary-school applications, while the number of children aged five to seven in classes bigger than the legal limit of 30 has risen to 10,010, more than double the 2007 figure of 4,280.
At secondary level, 92,000 children have been denied their first choice of school, while 30,000 have been offered none anywhere. Official figures for primary schools have not yet been published, but a huge shortfall of places is reported in, among others, Birmingham, Bristol and Surrey. In London, 25 out of 33 boroughs are unable to cope with demand.
To win an elusive place, parents are using tactics that make Machiavelli look like Snow White. "These are extreme times and they push people into extreme measures," says Janette Wallis, an editor of the Good Schools Guide. "People have always been willing to stretch the truth for a good school. There's no question we are seeing the most highly driven parents, who would have done anything to get their children in a private school in normal times, use the same dedication and drive to get them into a good state school."
Last week, Harrow Council, in north-west London, said that it was prosecuting Mranil Patel for fraud, after she pretended she lived at her mother's address to win her son a place at a popular school. In fact, Mrs Patel was living at her husband's house two miles away. She claimed she was living at her mother's during a brief split with her husband, but reconciled with him shortly after the school's application deadline. If found guilty, she risks a fine of up to 5,000 - or a prison sentence.
Outwardly, parents tutted; secretly, many felt: "There but for the grace of God." A recent YouGov survey showed that one in four parents would lie or cheat to win a school place. Since many are as coy about their deviousness as Hollywood starlets are about Botox, the real figure is probably higher.
In my madder moments, I have plotted how my husband and I could "separate" so I could temporarily move into a flat near a sought-after girls' comprehensive. Once Sasha's place was won (guaranteeing her sister's), we'd "reconcile". My more scrupulous husband will not consent, however; just as he refused to find God (we are both atheists) in order to get Sasha into the Ofsted-rated "outstanding" church primary yards from the house we used to live in.
Other parents had no such qualms. On Sundays, the ugly church at which they were required to worship three out of four Sundays a month for at least a year to secure a place, was surrounded by double-parked four-by-fours driven from as far as 10 miles away. The outfits and air-kissing on the pavement outside reminded me of Henley. "Of course the vicar knows most of us are agnostics at best," says Jane, who has three children at the school, despite living six miles away, and is a secret atheist. "His attitude is so long as there are bums on seats, who cares? We're all frantically volunteering for Sunday school, organising bake sales and having him over for drinks to keep him onside. It's totally hypocritical and everyone's in on it."
After all, an example is set from on high. No one doubts Tony Blair's or David Cameron's faith, but both shunned local primaries for their children in favour of distant church schools.
Other common ploys include having children "statemented" for special needs, which gives them priority in many entrance policies. "My child's a bit of a tearaway, but with the help of an educational psychologist, we're hoping to transform it into serious dyslexia and ADHD so he can get into ------," a neighbour cheerfully told me recently. Some put the "wrong" postcode with a correct address, knowing councils use the postcode to measure distance between home and school. If they are detected, they claim a slip of the pen. Others forge necessary council tax documents.
Some stay within the limits, if not the spirit, of the law by buying or renting a second home, or even a caravan, as close as possible (since catchments change from year to year) to their preferred school gates. Recently, John Burton, chair of governors of St Peter's, Eaton Square, a C of E primary much loved by politicians' children, admitted his family had twice moved into rented accommodation, while keeping his original home, to win his daughter a place at popular church secondary schools. "Parents pay money [for private schools] and everyone thinks that's fine, yet people think it's odd we'd want to move to stay in the state sector," he said, defending himself.
Parents in Devon, a grammar [selective school] hot spot, report an influx of pupils from as far as London, who live in their parents' second homes in term time and return to the capital for holidays.
Schools are fighting back with councils such as Poole using measures to spy on possible cheats. Friends of mine who have applied to church schools have got used to the vicar "unexpectedly" dropping in to check they are actually living at the address on their application forms. These vicars also demand to see parents' Baptism certificates and quiz children on the intricacies of their alleged faith.
Fiona Millar, partner of Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell and vice-chairwoman of Comprehensive Futures, an organisation that lobbies for fair admissions, says it's unfair to blame parents for wanting the best for their children. "The Government has set schools up as a market, so people are automatically going to gravitate to what they perceive to be the best. But the problem with creating a marketplace is you need complete elasticity of supply and demand. It works for baked beans when if more people want them you can produce more, but you can't magically conjure up more school places in a crisis year like this."
After years of pious hectoring by the likes of Millar about supporting the state system, I am more than a little disillusioned to discover that option is not practically available. The council is legally obliged to find Sasha a place, but with the five nearest schools to me oversubscribed, the one they will eventually offer seems certain to be miles away.
So Sasha's going to a private prep school. As for secondary school, I wonder if the vicar needs help with the flower rota? Or maybe I'll call the divorce lawyers after all.
SOURCE
Accusations of effeminacy wrong?
British TV star Jonathan Ross is in trouble again:
"Ross was involved in a light-hearted discussion about prizes in a competition themed around the fictional teen pop star when he joked: `If your son asks for a Hannah Montana MP3 player, you might want to already think about putting him down for adoption before he brings his...erm...partner home.'
A spokeswoman for Ofcom was unable to say how many people had complained but said: `We have had complaints. We are assessing those complaints against the broadcasting code.'
Listener Karen Mills told Pink News: `How can these people earn such huge sums of public money to come out with this discriminatory rubbish?
The BBC insisted there was no link to any specific individual and that the joke was part of a light-hearted exchange.
Known for his irreverent humour and flamboyant fashion sense, Ross also presents a chat show, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross on BBC1, featuring music from 4 Poofs and a Piano. ["Poof" is British slang for an effeminate homosexual]
Source
He obviously implied that a parent might be disappointed if their son brought home a homosexual lover but that is probably a pretty accurate judgment about how most parents would react. But truth-telling is a low priority in Britain.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Health and global warming: More dishonesty from Lancet
On anything with political implications, Lancet has been a Left-wing propaganda sheet for a long time -- and many of its purely medical articles draw unsustainable conclusions too -- as I often set out in FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC
Is a major new report about "the health effects of climate change" that describes "Climate" as the "biggest health threat" for the 21st century actually based upon a convenient forgetfulness of parts of the literature, and the scientific equivalent of chinese whispers? It may never be possible to answer that question in full and in full confidence. But there is one interesting, major detail that relates to something I just blogged about.
Here's how I started: having had read that at least in Europe, cooling kills more than warming, I looked with interest for any mention of that aspect in the report. My search brought me to page 9:
That looked like a peculiar statement indeed: sporting a reference to "health benefits" for the few (all of them, in Europe?), but suddenly making warming a bigger killer than cooling on a global scale. When was all of that discovered, I wondered? Thankfully, I could find reference 16 on the web:
16. Campbell-Lendrum DH, Corval n CF, Prss Ustn A. How much disease could climate change cause? In: McMichael AJ, Campbell-Lendrum DH, Corvalan CF, et al, eds. Climate change and human health: risks and responses. Geneva: WHO, 2003.
Relevant quotes from Campbell-Lendrum DH et al. (curiously, again from page 9):
The mystery was just deepening, with people suddenly dying not because of warmth or cold, but due to daily meteorological changes, and in particular because of "exposure to temperatures" outside of a "comfort range". It was time then to take a look at what those numerical references were about:
16. Alderson, M.R. Season and mortality. Health Trends 17: 87-96 (1985).
17. Green, M.S. et al. Excess winter-mortality from ischaemic heart disease and stroke during colder and warmer years in Israel. European Journal of Public Health 4: 3-11 (1994).
24. Kunst, A. et al. Outdoor air temperature and mortality in the Netherlands-a time series analysis. American Journal of Epidemiology 137(3): 331-341 (1993).
And what was even more notable were the "forgotten" references:
Keatinge, W.R. et al., Heat related mortality in warm and cold regions of Europe: observational study. BMJ 2000;321:670-673 ( 16 September )
Donaldson, G.C. and Keatinge, W.R. Excess winter mortality: influenza or cold stress? Observational study. BMJ 2002;324:89-90 ( 12 January )
In summary: the Lancet/UCL 2009 report claims warming is worse than cooling on the basis of a single book chapter from 2003 that mentions: a very old article from 1985; a 1993 research on Israel; a single 1994 article about the Netherlands to represent "cold and temperate regions".
And that very same single book chapter avoids any reference to two much more recent works, from 2000 and 2002, covering the whole of Europe, and pointing in the direction of.cooling being worse than warming.
The "forgotten references" from 2002 may as well have been unknown to the authors of the 2003 book chapter. But that is no excuse for the authors of the 2009 report. Also, the fact that those articles were forgotten is obviously due to pure chance: because otherwise, it would be an unfortunate case of "foul play in citation", a.k.a."bibliographic negligence" or "citation amnesia". [Omitting mention of "inconvenient" references is sadly all too common in every scientific literature I know -- JR]
But that was not all. Here a bit more from Campbell-Lendrum DH et al. (2003):
That is not the way Keatinge WR et al (2000) presented their results three years before:
Campbell-Lendrum DH et al. (2003) may as well have had a disagreement with Keatinge WR et al (2000): but if that were the case, they should have referenced to it and discussed however briefly the reasons for their disagreement. And of course the authors of the 2009 report should have included some remarks on why they would care not a bit about the "harvesting effect", since the.effect of that effect directly relates to people's health (well, it kills them.)
In summary: the Lancet/UCL 2009 report claims warming is worse than cooling on the basis of a single book chapter from 2003 that disregards the "harvesting effect", the very same effect used in a 2000 article to demonstrate that cooling is worse than warming.
It looks as if the information was available out there, but reached the authors of the 2009 report distorted by the opinion of the 2003 book chapter's authors . One may be forgiven to equate that with a game of..Chinese whispers (a.k.a. Telephone)!
Obviously there are so many claims one can investigate. But the fact that I was able in a few minutes to identify what are potentially major flaws in the estimation of the net benefits of CO2, suggests that more problems may lurk somewhere else, in the Lancet/UCL report.
SOURCE
NHS GP told family of meningitis death mother to 'stop fussing' three days before she died
Rushed consultation means that obvious syndrome was missed. People are just cattle to government doctors
A mother-of-two died from meningitis three days after a GP told her worried family to 'stop fussing' and she would soon be 'right as rain.' Two doctors put Karen Finan's symptoms down to a nasty stomach bug when they were called out to see her on successive days. But she became so ill she was rushed to hospital by ambulance and admitted to intensive care. Despite carrying out tests and scans, hospital doctors also couldn't correctly diagnose the problem, said husband Darren Finan.
The 37-year-old mother's brain became swollen and her life support machine was switched off after doctors said nothing more could be done for her. A post mortem later revealed she died from meningitis of the brain and septicaemia.
Mechanic Mr Finan, 44, of Wakefield, West Yorkshire, said:'We feel angry at the doctors because they dismissed Karen's condition and didn't seem to have the time to examine her properly - she could have been saved. 'We were given a card for the Meningitis Trust that lists the symptoms. Every single one Karen had on that first visit from the doctor - fever, vomiting, drowsiness, confusion, and severe muscle pain. It was just a string of errors from start to finish. 'They say with meningitis that every hour is critical - the longer they misdiagnosed Karen the more she was slipping away from us. We have been robbed.'
Mrs Finan fell ill on April 14 suffering from sickness, diarrhoea and stomach cramps. Mr Finan said they weren't too concerned at first and his wife tried to 'carry on as normal.' But she began complaining of a painful headache and the next morning he called the doctor's surgery.
On April 15 a GP from their health centre in Stanley came to the house and diagnosed gastroenteritis. 'The doctor who came to see her didn't examine her at all, he took one look at her and said it was gastroenteritis. Not even Karen's temperature or blood pressure was taken,' he said. By the evening her condition had deteriorated further.
Mr Finan said:'She kept saying "I'm red hot" but when I touched her skin it was cold, I put a fan on full blast to try and cool her down, I touched her back and she was dripping wet.' Within 24 hours she could not speak and her eyes were rolling to the back of her head.
On the Thursday another GP came out and confirmed gastroenteritis. 'The doctor was saying Karen just needed to go to bed, we needed to stop fussing and she'd be right as rain by the weekend. It took me 35 minutes to get Karen up to bed, she couldn't walk or stand on her feet - she was like a dead weight.
'When the doctor left that day I told Karen I loved her. She looked at me and was able to mouth the words "I love you more" and went to sleep. That was it.' By the next morning Mrs Finan was so ill her family dialled 999 and she was taken to Pinderfield's Hospital in Wakfield.
Tests were inconclusive and doctors said she may have had a stroke, a blood clot or a bleed on the brain. Sadly her condition deteriorated and her brain became badly swollen and she died on April 19 with her family at her bedside. The couple have two children, Stacey, 18, and Fletcher, 12.
NHS Wakefield district medical director, Mark Napper, said:'We offer our sincere sympathies to Mrs Finan's family for their loss. 'We are very concerned to hear they are unhappy with Mrs Finan's care and, although the family have not contacted us with their concerns, we take this very seriously, which is why we are initiating an investigation.'
SOURCE
Human noses too cold for bird flu
Bird flu may not have become the threat to humans that some predicted because our noses are too cold for the virus to thrive, UK researchers say. An Imperial College London recreation of the nose's environment found that at 32 degrees Celsius, avian flu viruses lose function and cannot spread. It is likely that the viruses have adapted to suit the warmer 40 degree environments in the guts of birds. A mutation would be needed before bird flu became a human problem, they said.
Published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, the study also found that human viruses are affected by the colder temperatures found in the nose but to nowhere near the same extent. In effect, human viruses are still able to replicate and spread under those conditions, the researchers said. Both viruses were able to grow well at 37 degrees - human core body temperature and equivalent to the environment in the lungs.
They also created a mutated human flu virus by adding a protein from the surface of an avian influenza virus. This virus - an example of how a new strain could develop and start a pandemic - was also unsuccessful at 32 degrees.
Study leader Professor Wendy Barclay said it suggested that if a new human influenza strain evolved by mixing with an avian influenza virus, it would still need to undergo further mutations before it could be successful in infecting humans. "Our study gives vital clues about what kinds of changes would be needed in order for them to mutate and infect humans, potentially helping us to identify which viruses could lead to a pandemic."
She added further research could point to warning signs in viruses that are beginning to make the kinds of genetic changes for them to jump into humans. "Animal viruses that spread well at low temperatures in these cultures could be more likely to cause the next pandemic than those which are restricted."
She said swine flu - which was spreading from person to person, seemingly through upper respiratory tract infection - was probably an example of a virus which had adapted to cope with the cooler temperatures in the nose.
Professor Ian Jones, an expert in virology at the University of Reading, said: "This work confirms the fact that temperature differences in the avian and human sites of influenza infection are key to virus establishment. "It is certainly part of the explanation of why avian viruses, such as H5N1, fail to transmit readily to humans." He added that the research also showed that the proteins on the outside of the virus were key to its function at different temperatures. "This helps the monitoring of avian flu as it indicates which changes to look out for."
SOURCE
Amazing: British medicines regulator grants first ever licence to homeopathic remedy
At least it's safe, I suppose. There is nothing but water in homeopathic remedies
The UK medicines regulator has granted its first licence to a homeopathic remedy under controversial new rules allowing complementary therapies to make medicinal claims. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has granted an arnica homeopathic product a licence for the relief of sprains or bruising. Experts say that it contains zero active ingredients and condemned the decision as a "cynical mockery of evidence-based medicine".
Nelsons Arnicare Arnica 30c pillules are the first product to be given a therapeutic indication via the Homeopathic National Rules Scheme, introduced in September 2006.
As opposed to conventional or herbal medicine, homeopathy is based on the principle that a substance that can make people ill can be diluted thousands of times to treat the symptoms it would otherwise create. Manufacturers of homeopathic remedies were previously banned from listing the clinical conditions or "indications" that products might be used to treat, due to a lack of evidence that they work. But under the new license granted by the MHRA, the label on a 5.30 packet of 84 pillules will now read: "A homeopathic medicinal product used within the homeopathic tradition for symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches and bruising or swelling after contusions." The homeopathic pillules are designed to be sucked or chewed and to be taken between meals.
Robert Wilson, chairman of Nelsons, said that the fact that therapeutic indications could be included on the packaging "not only opens the practice of homeopathy up to new users but also gives it added credibility as a safe and natural complement to conventional medicine".
But Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, said there is no evidence that the product has any benefit over a placebo treatment. "This is a huge rip-off and the label now makes false and misleading claims," he said. "There is no biological plausibility for this to work - it makes a cynical mockery of evidence-based medicine."
Nelsons, the largest manufacturer of natural healthcare products in Britain, also produces herbal tinctures for the Prince of Wales's Duchy Originals brand, which Professor Ernst has also criticised as "outright quackery". Last week, the Advertising Standards Authority reprimanded the Duchy brand over its promotional materials, ruling that claims made about the effectiveness of the tinctures were misleading.
Professor Ernst said that arnica-based homeopathic remedies were the most studied of all homeopathic products, but added: "Arnica is actually poisonous if you swallow it, so these pills contain essentially zero active ingredient." A randomised trial published by Professor Ernst and colleagues in 2003 showed no benefit from arnica in prevention of pain and bruising after surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome, with more adverse events in the arnica group than with placebo. He added that systematic reviews of all studies, including those from advocates of homeopathy, came to the same conclusion.
Bruises and sprains would heal in time, so people would not be doing themselves harm if they took the pills, he said, "but you might as well be swallowing water".
The MHRA said that the National Rules scheme was introduced to resolve an inconsistency in European legislation that meant that homeopathic products introduced before 1992 could state indications for their use, whereas remedies approved after that date could not make such claims. A spokeswoman for the Agency said that the National Rules Scheme "involves the assessment of quality, safety and consumer information". "This means that if an applicant can demonstrate that their product has been used in the UK homeopathic tradition for the relief or treatment of specific minor conditions or symptoms then the applicant may be granted a homeopathic marketing authorisation."
But, she added: "Indications are limited to the relief or treatment of minor symptoms or minor conditions, ie, symptoms or conditions which can ordinarily and with reasonable safety be relieved or treated without the supervision or intervention of a doctor. "Indications for serious conditions are prohibited."
SOURCE
Must not call probable homosexuals "gay"???
Batty Britain again. Isn't homosexuality supposed to be wonderful there?
"gay" is "indecent"? Whatever happened to "gay pride"? Some very confused thinking there.
Note that Campbell does not deny being homosexual above but that he has never "come out". The fact that he is black may account for that. The view that he is homosexual is widespread because of a number of unusual things about him -- such as an interest in fashion, an inability to bond with fellow footballers and a high level of emotionality.
On anything with political implications, Lancet has been a Left-wing propaganda sheet for a long time -- and many of its purely medical articles draw unsustainable conclusions too -- as I often set out in FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC
Is a major new report about "the health effects of climate change" that describes "Climate" as the "biggest health threat" for the 21st century actually based upon a convenient forgetfulness of parts of the literature, and the scientific equivalent of chinese whispers? It may never be possible to answer that question in full and in full confidence. But there is one interesting, major detail that relates to something I just blogged about.
Today (May 14) the "Lancet and University College London Institute for Global Health Commission" launched a report titled "Managing the health effects of climate change" (Lancet 2009; 373: 1693-733).
I looked at the report in terms of cold- and warm-weather related deaths and this is what I have found: The Lancet/UCL 2009 report's claim that warming is worse than cooling is based on a single book chapter from 2003 that forgets to mention two very relevant articles; and that disregards exactly the effect used in one of those two articles to demonstrate that cooling is worse than warming.
Here's how I started: having had read that at least in Europe, cooling kills more than warming, I looked with interest for any mention of that aspect in the report. My search brought me to page 9:
From a conservative perspective, although a minority of populations might experience health benefits (mostly related to a reduction in disease related to cold weather), the global burden of disease and premature death is expected to increase progressively.(ref. 16)
That looked like a peculiar statement indeed: sporting a reference to "health benefits" for the few (all of them, in Europe?), but suddenly making warming a bigger killer than cooling on a global scale. When was all of that discovered, I wondered? Thankfully, I could find reference 16 on the web:
16. Campbell-Lendrum DH, Corval n CF, Prss Ustn A. How much disease could climate change cause? In: McMichael AJ, Campbell-Lendrum DH, Corvalan CF, et al, eds. Climate change and human health: risks and responses. Geneva: WHO, 2003.
Relevant quotes from Campbell-Lendrum DH et al. (curiously, again from page 9):
[...] Direct physiological effects of heat and cold on cardiovascular mortality - Strength of evidence
The association between daily variation in meteorological conditions and mortality has been described in numerous studies from a wide range of populations in temperate climates (16, 17). These studies show that exposure to temperatures at either side of a "comfort range" is associated with an increased risk of (mainly cardio-pulmonary) mortality.
Given the limited number of studies on which to base global predictions, quantitative estimates are presented only for the best supported of the direct physiological effects of climate change-changes in mortality attributable to extreme temperature for one or several days. For cold and temperate regions, a relationship from a published study was used (24) [...]
The mystery was just deepening, with people suddenly dying not because of warmth or cold, but due to daily meteorological changes, and in particular because of "exposure to temperatures" outside of a "comfort range". It was time then to take a look at what those numerical references were about:
16. Alderson, M.R. Season and mortality. Health Trends 17: 87-96 (1985).
17. Green, M.S. et al. Excess winter-mortality from ischaemic heart disease and stroke during colder and warmer years in Israel. European Journal of Public Health 4: 3-11 (1994).
24. Kunst, A. et al. Outdoor air temperature and mortality in the Netherlands-a time series analysis. American Journal of Epidemiology 137(3): 331-341 (1993).
And what was even more notable were the "forgotten" references:
Keatinge, W.R. et al., Heat related mortality in warm and cold regions of Europe: observational study. BMJ 2000;321:670-673 ( 16 September )
Donaldson, G.C. and Keatinge, W.R. Excess winter mortality: influenza or cold stress? Observational study. BMJ 2002;324:89-90 ( 12 January )
In summary: the Lancet/UCL 2009 report claims warming is worse than cooling on the basis of a single book chapter from 2003 that mentions: a very old article from 1985; a 1993 research on Israel; a single 1994 article about the Netherlands to represent "cold and temperate regions".
And that very same single book chapter avoids any reference to two much more recent works, from 2000 and 2002, covering the whole of Europe, and pointing in the direction of.cooling being worse than warming.
The "forgotten references" from 2002 may as well have been unknown to the authors of the 2003 book chapter. But that is no excuse for the authors of the 2009 report. Also, the fact that those articles were forgotten is obviously due to pure chance: because otherwise, it would be an unfortunate case of "foul play in citation", a.k.a."bibliographic negligence" or "citation amnesia". [Omitting mention of "inconvenient" references is sadly all too common in every scientific literature I know -- JR]
But that was not all. Here a bit more from Campbell-Lendrum DH et al. (2003):
There also is evidence for a "harvesting effect", i.e. a period of unusually lower mortality following an extreme temperature period. This indicates that in some cases extreme temperatures advance the deaths of vulnerable people by a relatively short period, rather than killing people who would otherwise have lived to average life expectancy. However, this effect has not been quantified for temperature exposures and is not included in the model. As there is large uncertainty about the number of years that the casualties would have lived (i.e. the attributable years which are lost by exposure to the risk factor) the relative risk estimates will be used to calculate only attributable deaths, not DALYs. [...]
That is not the way Keatinge WR et al (2000) presented their results three years before:
Some of those who died in the heat may not have lived long if a heat wave had not occurred. Mortality often falls below baseline for several days after the end of a heat wave, and this has been interpreted as indicating that some of the people dying during the heat wave were already close to death.
[...] Falls in temperature in winter are closely followed by increased mortality, with characteristic time courses for different causes of death. The increases are of sufficient size to account for the overall increase in mortality in winter, suggesting that most excess winter deaths are due to relatively direct effects of cold on the population."
Campbell-Lendrum DH et al. (2003) may as well have had a disagreement with Keatinge WR et al (2000): but if that were the case, they should have referenced to it and discussed however briefly the reasons for their disagreement. And of course the authors of the 2009 report should have included some remarks on why they would care not a bit about the "harvesting effect", since the.effect of that effect directly relates to people's health (well, it kills them.)
In summary: the Lancet/UCL 2009 report claims warming is worse than cooling on the basis of a single book chapter from 2003 that disregards the "harvesting effect", the very same effect used in a 2000 article to demonstrate that cooling is worse than warming.
It looks as if the information was available out there, but reached the authors of the 2009 report distorted by the opinion of the 2003 book chapter's authors . One may be forgiven to equate that with a game of..Chinese whispers (a.k.a. Telephone)!
Obviously there are so many claims one can investigate. But the fact that I was able in a few minutes to identify what are potentially major flaws in the estimation of the net benefits of CO2, suggests that more problems may lurk somewhere else, in the Lancet/UCL report.
SOURCE
NHS GP told family of meningitis death mother to 'stop fussing' three days before she died
Rushed consultation means that obvious syndrome was missed. People are just cattle to government doctors
A mother-of-two died from meningitis three days after a GP told her worried family to 'stop fussing' and she would soon be 'right as rain.' Two doctors put Karen Finan's symptoms down to a nasty stomach bug when they were called out to see her on successive days. But she became so ill she was rushed to hospital by ambulance and admitted to intensive care. Despite carrying out tests and scans, hospital doctors also couldn't correctly diagnose the problem, said husband Darren Finan.
The 37-year-old mother's brain became swollen and her life support machine was switched off after doctors said nothing more could be done for her. A post mortem later revealed she died from meningitis of the brain and septicaemia.
Mechanic Mr Finan, 44, of Wakefield, West Yorkshire, said:'We feel angry at the doctors because they dismissed Karen's condition and didn't seem to have the time to examine her properly - she could have been saved. 'We were given a card for the Meningitis Trust that lists the symptoms. Every single one Karen had on that first visit from the doctor - fever, vomiting, drowsiness, confusion, and severe muscle pain. It was just a string of errors from start to finish. 'They say with meningitis that every hour is critical - the longer they misdiagnosed Karen the more she was slipping away from us. We have been robbed.'
Mrs Finan fell ill on April 14 suffering from sickness, diarrhoea and stomach cramps. Mr Finan said they weren't too concerned at first and his wife tried to 'carry on as normal.' But she began complaining of a painful headache and the next morning he called the doctor's surgery.
On April 15 a GP from their health centre in Stanley came to the house and diagnosed gastroenteritis. 'The doctor who came to see her didn't examine her at all, he took one look at her and said it was gastroenteritis. Not even Karen's temperature or blood pressure was taken,' he said. By the evening her condition had deteriorated further.
Mr Finan said:'She kept saying "I'm red hot" but when I touched her skin it was cold, I put a fan on full blast to try and cool her down, I touched her back and she was dripping wet.' Within 24 hours she could not speak and her eyes were rolling to the back of her head.
On the Thursday another GP came out and confirmed gastroenteritis. 'The doctor was saying Karen just needed to go to bed, we needed to stop fussing and she'd be right as rain by the weekend. It took me 35 minutes to get Karen up to bed, she couldn't walk or stand on her feet - she was like a dead weight.
'When the doctor left that day I told Karen I loved her. She looked at me and was able to mouth the words "I love you more" and went to sleep. That was it.' By the next morning Mrs Finan was so ill her family dialled 999 and she was taken to Pinderfield's Hospital in Wakfield.
Tests were inconclusive and doctors said she may have had a stroke, a blood clot or a bleed on the brain. Sadly her condition deteriorated and her brain became badly swollen and she died on April 19 with her family at her bedside. The couple have two children, Stacey, 18, and Fletcher, 12.
NHS Wakefield district medical director, Mark Napper, said:'We offer our sincere sympathies to Mrs Finan's family for their loss. 'We are very concerned to hear they are unhappy with Mrs Finan's care and, although the family have not contacted us with their concerns, we take this very seriously, which is why we are initiating an investigation.'
SOURCE
Human noses too cold for bird flu
Bird flu may not have become the threat to humans that some predicted because our noses are too cold for the virus to thrive, UK researchers say. An Imperial College London recreation of the nose's environment found that at 32 degrees Celsius, avian flu viruses lose function and cannot spread. It is likely that the viruses have adapted to suit the warmer 40 degree environments in the guts of birds. A mutation would be needed before bird flu became a human problem, they said.
Published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, the study also found that human viruses are affected by the colder temperatures found in the nose but to nowhere near the same extent. In effect, human viruses are still able to replicate and spread under those conditions, the researchers said. Both viruses were able to grow well at 37 degrees - human core body temperature and equivalent to the environment in the lungs.
They also created a mutated human flu virus by adding a protein from the surface of an avian influenza virus. This virus - an example of how a new strain could develop and start a pandemic - was also unsuccessful at 32 degrees.
Study leader Professor Wendy Barclay said it suggested that if a new human influenza strain evolved by mixing with an avian influenza virus, it would still need to undergo further mutations before it could be successful in infecting humans. "Our study gives vital clues about what kinds of changes would be needed in order for them to mutate and infect humans, potentially helping us to identify which viruses could lead to a pandemic."
She added further research could point to warning signs in viruses that are beginning to make the kinds of genetic changes for them to jump into humans. "Animal viruses that spread well at low temperatures in these cultures could be more likely to cause the next pandemic than those which are restricted."
She said swine flu - which was spreading from person to person, seemingly through upper respiratory tract infection - was probably an example of a virus which had adapted to cope with the cooler temperatures in the nose.
Professor Ian Jones, an expert in virology at the University of Reading, said: "This work confirms the fact that temperature differences in the avian and human sites of influenza infection are key to virus establishment. "It is certainly part of the explanation of why avian viruses, such as H5N1, fail to transmit readily to humans." He added that the research also showed that the proteins on the outside of the virus were key to its function at different temperatures. "This helps the monitoring of avian flu as it indicates which changes to look out for."
SOURCE
Amazing: British medicines regulator grants first ever licence to homeopathic remedy
At least it's safe, I suppose. There is nothing but water in homeopathic remedies
The UK medicines regulator has granted its first licence to a homeopathic remedy under controversial new rules allowing complementary therapies to make medicinal claims. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has granted an arnica homeopathic product a licence for the relief of sprains or bruising. Experts say that it contains zero active ingredients and condemned the decision as a "cynical mockery of evidence-based medicine".
Nelsons Arnicare Arnica 30c pillules are the first product to be given a therapeutic indication via the Homeopathic National Rules Scheme, introduced in September 2006.
As opposed to conventional or herbal medicine, homeopathy is based on the principle that a substance that can make people ill can be diluted thousands of times to treat the symptoms it would otherwise create. Manufacturers of homeopathic remedies were previously banned from listing the clinical conditions or "indications" that products might be used to treat, due to a lack of evidence that they work. But under the new license granted by the MHRA, the label on a 5.30 packet of 84 pillules will now read: "A homeopathic medicinal product used within the homeopathic tradition for symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches and bruising or swelling after contusions." The homeopathic pillules are designed to be sucked or chewed and to be taken between meals.
Robert Wilson, chairman of Nelsons, said that the fact that therapeutic indications could be included on the packaging "not only opens the practice of homeopathy up to new users but also gives it added credibility as a safe and natural complement to conventional medicine".
But Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, said there is no evidence that the product has any benefit over a placebo treatment. "This is a huge rip-off and the label now makes false and misleading claims," he said. "There is no biological plausibility for this to work - it makes a cynical mockery of evidence-based medicine."
Nelsons, the largest manufacturer of natural healthcare products in Britain, also produces herbal tinctures for the Prince of Wales's Duchy Originals brand, which Professor Ernst has also criticised as "outright quackery". Last week, the Advertising Standards Authority reprimanded the Duchy brand over its promotional materials, ruling that claims made about the effectiveness of the tinctures were misleading.
Professor Ernst said that arnica-based homeopathic remedies were the most studied of all homeopathic products, but added: "Arnica is actually poisonous if you swallow it, so these pills contain essentially zero active ingredient." A randomised trial published by Professor Ernst and colleagues in 2003 showed no benefit from arnica in prevention of pain and bruising after surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome, with more adverse events in the arnica group than with placebo. He added that systematic reviews of all studies, including those from advocates of homeopathy, came to the same conclusion.
Bruises and sprains would heal in time, so people would not be doing themselves harm if they took the pills, he said, "but you might as well be swallowing water".
The MHRA said that the National Rules scheme was introduced to resolve an inconsistency in European legislation that meant that homeopathic products introduced before 1992 could state indications for their use, whereas remedies approved after that date could not make such claims. A spokeswoman for the Agency said that the National Rules Scheme "involves the assessment of quality, safety and consumer information". "This means that if an applicant can demonstrate that their product has been used in the UK homeopathic tradition for the relief or treatment of specific minor conditions or symptoms then the applicant may be granted a homeopathic marketing authorisation."
But, she added: "Indications are limited to the relief or treatment of minor symptoms or minor conditions, ie, symptoms or conditions which can ordinarily and with reasonable safety be relieved or treated without the supervision or intervention of a doctor. "Indications for serious conditions are prohibited."
SOURCE
Must not call probable homosexuals "gay"???
Batty Britain again. Isn't homosexuality supposed to be wonderful there?
"A man and a 14-year-old boy have been banned from attending football matches for three years for shouting homophobic chants at Portsmouth and former England defender Sol Campbell [pic above]. Ian Trow, 42, from Milton Keynes in southern England, and the boy - who cannot be named for legal reasons - pleaded not guilty to indecent chanting but were convicted by magistrates in Portsmouth overnight.
The chants were aimed at Campbell during a match against his former club Tottenham at Portsmouth's Fratton Park stadium in September last year.
After a three-hour trial, Georgette Holbrook, chairwoman of the magistrates' panel, found the two defendants had chanted: "Come on gay boy, that's my gay boy." She said: "We find that the words used were in extremely bad taste, they were inappropriate, shocking and disgusting, and as such they were indecent."
In a statement read to the court, Campbell said he had felt "totally victimised and helpless by the abuse I received.
Both Trow and the boy were banned from watching football matches for three years, while Trow was also fined STG500 ($1000) and ordered to pay STG400 ($800) costs.
The prosecuting authorities in England said that while cases of racist chanting have been prosecuted before, this was the first case of indecent chanting to be brought to the courts.
Source
"gay" is "indecent"? Whatever happened to "gay pride"? Some very confused thinking there.
Note that Campbell does not deny being homosexual above but that he has never "come out". The fact that he is black may account for that. The view that he is homosexual is widespread because of a number of unusual things about him -- such as an interest in fashion, an inability to bond with fellow footballers and a high level of emotionality.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Moronic British immigration rules hurt the hospitals
They are cracking down heavily on legal immigration when over 90% of their problem is illegal immigration -- which is "too hard" to solve
Patient safety could be put at risk because changes to immigration rules could force hundreds of junior doctors out of the NHS, a union warns. The British Medical Association said reform of the tier one skilled migrant category was unfair on foreign medics. The union said it meant doctors in the first two years of training would not be able to apply for the next stage. The BMA added that this could lead to a shortage of doctors eventually, compromising safety in the process.
BMA chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum has now written to Health Secretary Alan Johnson urging him to intervene to protect the NHS workforce. He wants the Department of Health to take up the issue with the Home Office immediately as the NHS is also facing difficulties over the forthcoming introduction of the European working directive for junior doctors.
From August, the scope of the directive will be extended to junior doctors, limiting their working week to 48 hours. Dr Meldrum said: "The full implementation of the directive coupled with a situation in which a proportion of prospective trainees can no longer continue with their training due to ever-tightening immigration rules is likely to exacerbate rota gaps, putting patient safety at risk. "The BMA is requesting that the Department of Health intervenes."
The change to immigration rules in March means that those applying for the tier one category, which in the heath service covers junior doctors who have completed the foundation stage of their training and want to move on to specialist training, need to have a master's degree. But a medical degree - despite being a five-year course - is only classed as a bachelor's, meaning all foreign junior doctors from outside the EU will be excluded.
In his letter, Dr Meldrum pointed out that as well as affecting those doctors who have already started junior doctor training, the thousands of foreign medical students at university in the UK could also end up leaving. He said workforce planning in the health service was counting on these students becoming NHS doctors over the next few years.
SOURCE
'Club class' illegal immigrants are paying 10,000 to fly to Britain on tourist planes
Illegal immigrants posing as tourists are paying up to 10,000 each to fly into Britain as part of a 'club class' smuggling service. Organised gangs of people smugglers are targeting holiday flights from the Continent, particularly Greece, to the Irish Republic. The 10,000 cost compares to an average of just 500 to 1,000 for those willing to take their chances on lorries and trains crossing the Channel from Calais to Dover. But the expensive 'immigration package', which includes forged passports and visas, has a much higher chance of success, according to officials.
The latest smuggling plan came to light earlier this week after the arrest of a ten-strong gang in Paris. They are believed to have made 500,000 in just nine months successfully smuggling scores of illegal migrants. Based in a flat close to the Gare du Nord Eurostar station, they regularly booked migrants on flights to the Irish Republic. Greece, which is a major transit point to Britain for migrants from Asia, was a popular route. Once in the Republic, the illegal migrants would use the forged papers to enter Britain via domestic flights or ferries.
'It was the club class service for migrants who had sold their homes and businesses to start a new life in the UK,' said an officer from the French anti-illegal immigration agency OCRIEST. 'These were people who were prepared to devote their life's savings to getting to their Eldorado, and an airborne immigration package was their best option.'
He said tourist flights from Greece to Ireland were not policed as stringently as those on major tourist or business routes and that it was relatively easy for illegal migrants from Asia and Eastern Europe to mingle with planeloads full of Greek and Irish holidaymakers. 'They are often waved through customs and immigration because they're not obvious flights for illegal migrants to take,' the officer said.
'Another advantage for the migrants is that passports of people resembling them can be stolen or bought in Greece and can then be used on the planes. 'Immigration procedures are far tougher in France and Britain, and it's much harder to get hold of forged travel documents. It's a highly sophisticated route, but one which is still used regularly. 'Airborne illegal immigration does not come cheap, but for those who can afford it, it's a much quicker and hassle-free option than travelling all the way to Calais to try to get a place in the back of a lorry.'
The gang, Iraqi and Iranian men aged between 26 and 54, have made full confessions in exchange for a reduction in prison sentences, which could top ten years. They are expected to be charged with a range of people-smuggling offences. Jean-Michel Fauvergue, the head of OCRIEST, said: 'This gang was extremely well organised and not solely operating on French territory.'
SOURCE
Britain's strange, silent strangulation of liberty
The organiser of Freedom Summer explains why defending civil society from the state has never been more important
Every era has its own brand of state regulation; at different times, the repressive powers of the state are focused on different areas of social life. Today's state is getting itself into some very strange corners indeed.
Twenty years ago, who would have thought that the state would seek to regulate mums helping out at their children's nursery? Under the UK Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act - all nursery helpers must have their criminal records checked before being given the all-clear to watch over toddlers' face-painting and Play-Doh sessions.
Who would have thought that police officers would force tourists to delete their photos of the architecturally interesting but otherwise unimportant Vauxhall bus station in London, in the name of preventing terrorism? (1) Who'd have guessed that under the Counter-Terrorism Act, it would become an offence to take pictures of police officers?
In previous times, the formidable powers of the state might have been used to crush demonstrations or dismantle threatening organisations. Now officials are focusing their fire on the pub darts contest, the local nursery, the amateur photographer, the drink in the park.
In 2009, if you are sharing a summers' drink in the park, a police officer has the power to tip your bottle of wine down the drain, without any justification - and it is a criminal offence for you to refuse. Virtually every activity in pubs - from dancing, singalongs, music, to darts and chess - now requires a specific council licence. A Cambridge pub had to cancel a poetry reading recently, because it didn't have a `spoken word licence'.
These are the areas of society that were previously the most autonomous - the places where people came together, to share a drink, or organise competitions and games - without using the language or methods of bureaucracy. Unlike the world of work, these were places where no forms were signed and no contracts made. This was civil society - a space that was neither the market nor the state - where people collaborated informally and freely with one another.
Yet it is precisely these most informal spheres that are becoming the most regulated. It is now almost the case that there are more rules and regulations in pubs than in the workplace; more in the nursery than in the bank.
These informal spheres are absolutely fundamental to social life. It is in these spaces that people form relationships that are not coerced, and not based on hostile contracting interests. These are the spaces where people work on getting things done together, in the interests and for the enjoyment of all. In civil society, things work differently - a list of volunteers is scribbled in the team book, not on a form; arrangements are made by phone or in the street, rather than by contract.
State intervention into these spheres of everyday life has happened quietly; it is not, generally, the subject of political discussion or protest. These issues are rarely discussed on the floor of the House of Commons, or even by many civil liberties organisations.
This summer, the Manifesto Club has organised Freedom Summer - to raise awareness about the hyperregulation of everyday life, and raise a shout of protest against it. On Thursday, at a pub in central London, we're launching our campaign with a discussion among fellow libertarians, including Anthony Barnett from the Convention on Modern Liberty, Phil Booth from No2ID, and columnist Suzanne Moore. Over the next few months, events include: a salon in Huddersfield on the regulation of drinking; a sports day against vetting; a protest picnic on Brighton beach against booze bans; a cabaret against new visa controls for visiting artists and academics; and the launch of a new photo-book against ludicrous safety signs in public spaces.
It is important that Freedom Summer is a DIY political space - where people can propose their own initiatives, taking up the freedom issues that they are passionate about in their local areas. We hope this will become a festival of political experimentation, to work out together how we can make the hyperregulation of everyday life a political issue.
Summer is generally the time when police forces launch their Operation Public Drinking, Operation Public Dancing, or Operation Public Photography. Summer should also be the time when we start to organise a resistance to the hyperregulation our nurseries, pubs and parks.
SOURCE
The health alerts that make you ill: Negative thoughts 'can induce sickness'
If you feel ill just looking at the side effects of the medicine that's supposed to cure you, it might be best not to bother. The warnings themselves might actually be making you sick, scientists say. A series of studies from around the world has shown that if you believe something could make you ill, it might well do just that. Simply reading the side-effects on a bottle of tablets raises your risk of experiencing them. And, taken to its extreme, patients who believe they will not survive surgery, are more likely to die on the operating table.
Just as positive thinking can be good for your health, negative thoughts can be bad for well-being. 'The idea that believing you are ill can make you ill sounds far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond a doubt that the converse is true - the power of suggestion can improve health,' reports New Scientist magazine. 'The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects.' Examples included clinical trials for new drugs, in which up to a quarter of patients given dummy versions experienced the side-effects associated with the real thing.
In trials for blood pressure-lowering beta blockers, tiredness and loss of libido were just as common in those given dummy versions. And more than half of chemotherapy patients start experiencing the nausea -- 'A self-fulfilling prophecy' -- associated with the cancer treatment days before it started. The phenomenon raises the prospect that just telling a patient about the side effects associated with their pills, could make their health worse.
Hull University psychologist Professor Giuliana Mazzoni said: 'On the one hand, people have the right to be informed about what to expect but this makes it more likely they will experience side-effects.'
Research has shown that women who believe they are particularly prone to heart attack are nearly four times as likely to die from coronary conditions than other women.
The power of suggestion can also be responsible for mass outbreaks of ' disease'. In 1988, a high school teacher, in Tennessee in the U.S, noticed a gasoline-like smell and began to complain of headache, nausea, shortness of breath and dizziness. The school was evacuated and over the next week, more than 100 staff and students were admitted to casualty complaining of similar symptoms. Extensive tests could find no medical explanation for their problems.
Dr Clifton Meador, of Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville in the U.S, said fear can turn into self-fulfilling prophecy. 'Bad news promotes bad physiology. I think that you can persuade people that they're going to die and have it happen. I don't think there is anything mystical about it. We're uncomfortable with the idea that words or symbolic actions can cause death because it changes our biomolecular model of the world.'
SOURCE
They are cracking down heavily on legal immigration when over 90% of their problem is illegal immigration -- which is "too hard" to solve
Patient safety could be put at risk because changes to immigration rules could force hundreds of junior doctors out of the NHS, a union warns. The British Medical Association said reform of the tier one skilled migrant category was unfair on foreign medics. The union said it meant doctors in the first two years of training would not be able to apply for the next stage. The BMA added that this could lead to a shortage of doctors eventually, compromising safety in the process.
BMA chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum has now written to Health Secretary Alan Johnson urging him to intervene to protect the NHS workforce. He wants the Department of Health to take up the issue with the Home Office immediately as the NHS is also facing difficulties over the forthcoming introduction of the European working directive for junior doctors.
From August, the scope of the directive will be extended to junior doctors, limiting their working week to 48 hours. Dr Meldrum said: "The full implementation of the directive coupled with a situation in which a proportion of prospective trainees can no longer continue with their training due to ever-tightening immigration rules is likely to exacerbate rota gaps, putting patient safety at risk. "The BMA is requesting that the Department of Health intervenes."
The change to immigration rules in March means that those applying for the tier one category, which in the heath service covers junior doctors who have completed the foundation stage of their training and want to move on to specialist training, need to have a master's degree. But a medical degree - despite being a five-year course - is only classed as a bachelor's, meaning all foreign junior doctors from outside the EU will be excluded.
In his letter, Dr Meldrum pointed out that as well as affecting those doctors who have already started junior doctor training, the thousands of foreign medical students at university in the UK could also end up leaving. He said workforce planning in the health service was counting on these students becoming NHS doctors over the next few years.
SOURCE
'Club class' illegal immigrants are paying 10,000 to fly to Britain on tourist planes
Illegal immigrants posing as tourists are paying up to 10,000 each to fly into Britain as part of a 'club class' smuggling service. Organised gangs of people smugglers are targeting holiday flights from the Continent, particularly Greece, to the Irish Republic. The 10,000 cost compares to an average of just 500 to 1,000 for those willing to take their chances on lorries and trains crossing the Channel from Calais to Dover. But the expensive 'immigration package', which includes forged passports and visas, has a much higher chance of success, according to officials.
The latest smuggling plan came to light earlier this week after the arrest of a ten-strong gang in Paris. They are believed to have made 500,000 in just nine months successfully smuggling scores of illegal migrants. Based in a flat close to the Gare du Nord Eurostar station, they regularly booked migrants on flights to the Irish Republic. Greece, which is a major transit point to Britain for migrants from Asia, was a popular route. Once in the Republic, the illegal migrants would use the forged papers to enter Britain via domestic flights or ferries.
'It was the club class service for migrants who had sold their homes and businesses to start a new life in the UK,' said an officer from the French anti-illegal immigration agency OCRIEST. 'These were people who were prepared to devote their life's savings to getting to their Eldorado, and an airborne immigration package was their best option.'
He said tourist flights from Greece to Ireland were not policed as stringently as those on major tourist or business routes and that it was relatively easy for illegal migrants from Asia and Eastern Europe to mingle with planeloads full of Greek and Irish holidaymakers. 'They are often waved through customs and immigration because they're not obvious flights for illegal migrants to take,' the officer said.
'Another advantage for the migrants is that passports of people resembling them can be stolen or bought in Greece and can then be used on the planes. 'Immigration procedures are far tougher in France and Britain, and it's much harder to get hold of forged travel documents. It's a highly sophisticated route, but one which is still used regularly. 'Airborne illegal immigration does not come cheap, but for those who can afford it, it's a much quicker and hassle-free option than travelling all the way to Calais to try to get a place in the back of a lorry.'
The gang, Iraqi and Iranian men aged between 26 and 54, have made full confessions in exchange for a reduction in prison sentences, which could top ten years. They are expected to be charged with a range of people-smuggling offences. Jean-Michel Fauvergue, the head of OCRIEST, said: 'This gang was extremely well organised and not solely operating on French territory.'
SOURCE
Britain's strange, silent strangulation of liberty
The organiser of Freedom Summer explains why defending civil society from the state has never been more important
Every era has its own brand of state regulation; at different times, the repressive powers of the state are focused on different areas of social life. Today's state is getting itself into some very strange corners indeed.
Twenty years ago, who would have thought that the state would seek to regulate mums helping out at their children's nursery? Under the UK Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act - all nursery helpers must have their criminal records checked before being given the all-clear to watch over toddlers' face-painting and Play-Doh sessions.
Who would have thought that police officers would force tourists to delete their photos of the architecturally interesting but otherwise unimportant Vauxhall bus station in London, in the name of preventing terrorism? (1) Who'd have guessed that under the Counter-Terrorism Act, it would become an offence to take pictures of police officers?
In previous times, the formidable powers of the state might have been used to crush demonstrations or dismantle threatening organisations. Now officials are focusing their fire on the pub darts contest, the local nursery, the amateur photographer, the drink in the park.
In 2009, if you are sharing a summers' drink in the park, a police officer has the power to tip your bottle of wine down the drain, without any justification - and it is a criminal offence for you to refuse. Virtually every activity in pubs - from dancing, singalongs, music, to darts and chess - now requires a specific council licence. A Cambridge pub had to cancel a poetry reading recently, because it didn't have a `spoken word licence'.
These are the areas of society that were previously the most autonomous - the places where people came together, to share a drink, or organise competitions and games - without using the language or methods of bureaucracy. Unlike the world of work, these were places where no forms were signed and no contracts made. This was civil society - a space that was neither the market nor the state - where people collaborated informally and freely with one another.
Yet it is precisely these most informal spheres that are becoming the most regulated. It is now almost the case that there are more rules and regulations in pubs than in the workplace; more in the nursery than in the bank.
These informal spheres are absolutely fundamental to social life. It is in these spaces that people form relationships that are not coerced, and not based on hostile contracting interests. These are the spaces where people work on getting things done together, in the interests and for the enjoyment of all. In civil society, things work differently - a list of volunteers is scribbled in the team book, not on a form; arrangements are made by phone or in the street, rather than by contract.
State intervention into these spheres of everyday life has happened quietly; it is not, generally, the subject of political discussion or protest. These issues are rarely discussed on the floor of the House of Commons, or even by many civil liberties organisations.
This summer, the Manifesto Club has organised Freedom Summer - to raise awareness about the hyperregulation of everyday life, and raise a shout of protest against it. On Thursday, at a pub in central London, we're launching our campaign with a discussion among fellow libertarians, including Anthony Barnett from the Convention on Modern Liberty, Phil Booth from No2ID, and columnist Suzanne Moore. Over the next few months, events include: a salon in Huddersfield on the regulation of drinking; a sports day against vetting; a protest picnic on Brighton beach against booze bans; a cabaret against new visa controls for visiting artists and academics; and the launch of a new photo-book against ludicrous safety signs in public spaces.
It is important that Freedom Summer is a DIY political space - where people can propose their own initiatives, taking up the freedom issues that they are passionate about in their local areas. We hope this will become a festival of political experimentation, to work out together how we can make the hyperregulation of everyday life a political issue.
Summer is generally the time when police forces launch their Operation Public Drinking, Operation Public Dancing, or Operation Public Photography. Summer should also be the time when we start to organise a resistance to the hyperregulation our nurseries, pubs and parks.
SOURCE
The health alerts that make you ill: Negative thoughts 'can induce sickness'
If you feel ill just looking at the side effects of the medicine that's supposed to cure you, it might be best not to bother. The warnings themselves might actually be making you sick, scientists say. A series of studies from around the world has shown that if you believe something could make you ill, it might well do just that. Simply reading the side-effects on a bottle of tablets raises your risk of experiencing them. And, taken to its extreme, patients who believe they will not survive surgery, are more likely to die on the operating table.
Just as positive thinking can be good for your health, negative thoughts can be bad for well-being. 'The idea that believing you are ill can make you ill sounds far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond a doubt that the converse is true - the power of suggestion can improve health,' reports New Scientist magazine. 'The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects.' Examples included clinical trials for new drugs, in which up to a quarter of patients given dummy versions experienced the side-effects associated with the real thing.
In trials for blood pressure-lowering beta blockers, tiredness and loss of libido were just as common in those given dummy versions. And more than half of chemotherapy patients start experiencing the nausea -- 'A self-fulfilling prophecy' -- associated with the cancer treatment days before it started. The phenomenon raises the prospect that just telling a patient about the side effects associated with their pills, could make their health worse.
Hull University psychologist Professor Giuliana Mazzoni said: 'On the one hand, people have the right to be informed about what to expect but this makes it more likely they will experience side-effects.'
Research has shown that women who believe they are particularly prone to heart attack are nearly four times as likely to die from coronary conditions than other women.
The power of suggestion can also be responsible for mass outbreaks of ' disease'. In 1988, a high school teacher, in Tennessee in the U.S, noticed a gasoline-like smell and began to complain of headache, nausea, shortness of breath and dizziness. The school was evacuated and over the next week, more than 100 staff and students were admitted to casualty complaining of similar symptoms. Extensive tests could find no medical explanation for their problems.
Dr Clifton Meador, of Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville in the U.S, said fear can turn into self-fulfilling prophecy. 'Bad news promotes bad physiology. I think that you can persuade people that they're going to die and have it happen. I don't think there is anything mystical about it. We're uncomfortable with the idea that words or symbolic actions can cause death because it changes our biomolecular model of the world.'
SOURCE
Friday, May 15, 2009
Heh! British children's advisor on healthy eating told son is overweight
Will this totally unscientific mania ever fade?
A children's advisor on healthy eating, Michala Forder, has been warned her son Zac is overweight and risking cancer because he is one pound over NHS guidelines.
Health officials sent a letter to Mrs Forder telling her that Zac [above], who weighs 3st 5lbs, is in danger of health problems in later life including diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure because of his weight.
Mrs Forder, a pre-school practitioner who advises children about healthy eating, said she was furious at the letter and accused Oxfordshire NHS Primary Care Trust of labelling children and potentially pushing them into crash dieting.
The trust has been weighing and measuring around 11,000 reception year pupils, aged four and five, and year six pupils, aged 10 and 11, as part of the National Child Measurement Programme. It is designed to alert parents to potential health problems. Parents can opt out of the scheme, but if they do not, they get a letter telling them if their child is underweight, a healthy weight, overweight or very overweight.
Mrs Forder, 37, from Carterton, Oxon, said she and other mothers at Edith Moorhouse Primary School, in Carterton, were angry at their children being labelled overweight. The letter indicated that Zac's ideal weight for his age and height should be between 2st 7lb and 3st 4lb.
Mrs Forder said she had not told her son about the contents of the letter, adding: "I could have told him the doctors think he is overweight. He could then take it upon himself to start on an eating disorder because of it."
The PCT apologised for any distress caused to Mrs Forder, and said it was following Department of Health guidelines on the format and content of the letter.
A spokesman for Beat, an eating disorders charity, said: "There surely has to be a better way for this information to be put across that will make things better, not worse. "Such rigid interpretation of these guidelines only serves to stigmatise children for their weight and shape."
SOURCE
British infants' classrooms 'becoming increasingly overcrowded'
A considerable irony here: It is only with the very young that small classes seem to be beneficial. The class size fetish is in general a crock, according to the research. Mandates to reduce class sizes just encourage the hiring of incompetent teachers. See here.
The number of unlawfully large classes for infants has more than doubled in two years, according to government figures released yesterday. Ten thousand pupils aged 5 to 7 are taught in classes of more than 30 children. This age group should be taught in smaller groups but the number of infant classes classed as unlawfully large has risen from 130 in 2007 to 310 this year.
David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Shadow Schools Secretary, said: "The number of children in unacceptably large classes has rocketed over recent years. These huge classes make it difficult for teachers to give our youngest children the individual attention they need when they start school.
"The situation could be even worse next year given the shortage of school places across the country. We know that smaller infant classes make a real difference. We need to be cutting class sizes to private school levels of 15."
Nick Gibb, the Tory schools spokesman, said: "The huge rise in unlawfully large class sizes underlines concern that there will not be enough primary provision to cover the likely number of children needing a place in September. "It would be a tragedy if the Government's short-term policy of reducing surplus places led to children missing their first few weeks of school."
Civitas, the think-tank, said even class sizes defined as small - under 30 - were too big, particularly when compared with other countries. An official said: "Academic research on class size defines `small' as being between 15 and 20 pupils in a class. Yet in 1997, the Government's pledge for small infant class sizes set a legal limit of 30 pupils. The Government has failed to honour even this flawed pledge by allowing infant classes over 30 in some circumstances."
Christine Blower, the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "The Government's pledge to reduce class sizes appears to be unravelling at the edges. For all those primary teachers who are now facing the impossible job of fully responding to each child's needs in excessively large classes, this deterioration is a blow both to their stress levels and to teaching and learning."
SOURCE
Big waste of money on crooked NHS doctors
Family doctors accused of misconduct are being suspended for up to four years and at a cost of up to 900,000, according to figures revealed by the NHS under the Freedom of Information Act.
Primary care trusts in England disclosed that 134 GPs have been suspended over the last three years. The trusts pay 90 per cent of the doctors' salaries during suspension, costing the NHS 8.2 million.
Norman Lamb, health spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, described the costs as scandalous. "They involve a huge waste of public money and show that the system of pursuing allegations against doctors is failing," he told The Guardian.
GPs suspected of misconduct are suspended by their primary care trust or by the General Medical Council, which regulates doctors. Trusts handle less serious cases and must seek approval if they last longer than six months. John Canning, of the British Medical Association, said that the disciplinary system can be "quite slow" to ensure that both sides have time to prepare. "But even bearing that in mind, too many cases take too long," he said.
David Stout, director of the PCT Network, said that the speed of the system coulod be frustrating. "Some of the delays are excessive, very costly and benefit nobody."
The trust for Haringey, north London, spent 1.4 million in the last three years on three GPs who were suspended. Newham, east London, spent 1.1 million on seven suspended doctors since 2006.
SOURCE
Leftist British justice boss publicly mocked as police chief slams 'Hokey Cokey' justice system
Jacqui Smith was yesterday publicly mocked by police for presiding over a `Hokey Cokey' justice system that ` let all the prisoners out'. With the Home Secretary sitting uncomfortably next to him on stage, Police Federation chairman Paul McKeever said officers are `sick to death' of seeing the same criminals again and again.
At the Federation's annual conference in Bournemouth, he added: `The Government has created the Hokey Cokey criminal justice system. `Yes, conference, it's in out, in out, let all the prisoners out. In out, in out, shake the system about.'
Mr McKeever also said officers view her with `real suspicion and distrust' after clashes over pay, pensions and workplace reform. Miss Smith was later harangued from the conference floor by rank-and-file officers about the MPs' expenses scandal and the Government's treatment of the Gurkhas.
During his speech, Mr McKeever described as a `big lie' the belief that constant modernisation and reshaping of the police will solve crime more effectively. `We and the people we serve are being failed by the rest of the criminal justice system,' he said. `A criminal justice system that isn't working and is seen by many people as being there to protect offenders' interests above the interests of law-abiding members of the public.
'Rather than addressing the real problem of ineffective sanctions, ineffective education programmes and ineffective rehabilitation, the focus is on us, the police, to detect the same people more often and bring them before the courts again and again.'
Mr McKeever said the police are left in a `constant state of flux' as politicians constantly demand change. `In effect, in the eyes of politicians, the police are the problem that needs to be solved, when the reality is that it is the criminals who are the problem and we are the solution,' he added.
It is the second year running Miss Smith has had a tough time at the conference. Last year former chairman Jan Berry taunted her with a pun about her lacking `balls'.
Both Miss Smith and Mr McKeever paid tribute to police officers who have recently been killed in the line of duty. The Federation chairman called for those who kill police to `rot' in jail for the rest of their lives.
Mr McKeever criticised the delay in awarding Detective Constable Stephen Oake - who was stabbed to death in a terror raid in 2003 - the Queen's Gallantry Medal. `We should never have to wait five years to recognise our colleagues who make the ultimate sacrifice keeping safe the communities we serve,' he said.
Miss Smith also praised the `hard work' of police during the G20 protests last month. But delegates denounced Independent Police Complaints Commission chairman Nick Hardwick, who publicly criticised officers before an investigation into their conduct at the G20 had finished.
SOURCE
Slurred by the adoption Nazis: Critics of gay parenting are branded 'retarded homophobes'
Hate speech is fine when Leftist social workers use it. The headline above is from the "Daily Mail", deliberately showing that two can play the abuse game
People who have concerns about the adoption of children by gay couples are 'retarded homophobes', the state-funded national adoption agency said yesterday. Those who protest over controversial gay adoption laws are merely 'whinging', according to the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. Its insulting description angered senior MPs and former Cabinet Ministers, Roman Catholic and Church of England leaders.
It also offended disability campaigners, who have been trying to discourage the use of the word 'retarded' for years. Whitehall has banned the word for civil servants. Many of those who are worried about gay adoption say that approving same-sex relationships goes against their Christian faith.
Mike Judge, of the Christian Institute thinktank, said last night: 'Christians are tired of being marginalised. 'We don't expect everyone to agree with us but organisations such as the BAAF should try to avoid this kind of language.' Tory MP Julian Brazier, co-chairman of the all-party Commons group on adoption and fostering, said: 'I work with BAAF all the time and I know how much they bring to adoption. 'I must say I am very sad that they should use this language about people who have an honest disagreement with them.'
Author Patricia Morgan, who has published a study of gay adoption, said: 'It is disgraceful that they do not wish to discuss the pros and cons of gay adoption. They just go in for abuse. They do not appear interested in evidence about the outcomes for children. And it is a disgusting phrase to use.'
The British Association for Adoption and Fostering sets rules and organises training for social workers across the country. Every local council with a children's services department is a paying member of the organisation, and the bulk of its 6million-a-year budget comes from the taxpayer. It runs the national adoption register for the Department of Children, Schools and Families. The 'retarded homophobe' attack was published in a BAAF guide to adoption for homosexual couples. It was repeated in its newspaper Be My Parent, which advertises children who need homes.
Would-be gay adopters were told: 'Most importantly, don't worry about society. 'Children need good parents much more than retarded homophobes need an excuse to whinge, so don't let your worries about society's reaction hinder your desire and ability to give a child a loving caring home.'
BAAF's Pink Guide to Adoption for Lesbians and Gay Men was written by Nicola Hill, a former Guardian journalist and charity worker. It was launched at a BAAF conference this week aimed at 'overcoming resistance - celebrating the role of lesbian and gay carers'. The meeting discussed 'what lesbian and gay carers can offer to the adoption and fostering process and how agencies can facilitate their contribution'. Those attending were also told that 'we will confront the challenges that such initiatives may provoke to established attitudes and assumptions'.
The BAAF's protective attitude to gay couples appears to differ from the way it deals with other people. The organisation strongly supports the legal requirement that the perceived interests of children are paramount and the wishes of would-be parents are of minor importance. It insists that children go to homes only of adoptive parents of the same race. It questions would-be adoptive couples about their views on race and says ' vigorous efforts are made to find a family that reflects the child's individual identity'.
Couples who wish to adopt are often rejected because social workers consider them too old or overweight, or because they smoke. Some have even been judged to be 'too middle class'.
Until Tony Blair's 2002 Adoption Act, children could be adopted only by married couples or single people. The new law made it possible for unmarried and gay couples to adopt. Mr Blair argued that the reform would increase the proportion of the 60,000 children in state care who win new families through adoption. But the numbers have actually fallen. Since 2004, adoptions from care have dropped from 3,800 a year to 3,200.
The great majority of those are white children. Black children are missing out because there is a shortage of black couples wishing to adopt, yet social workers oppose sending them to non-black families.
There were just 30 adoptions by gay couples and 50 by lesbian couples last year. There have been setbacks to the cause of gay parenting. In 2006, gay foster parents Craig Faunch and Ian Wathey were jailed for paedophile offences against boys at their home in Pontefract, West Yorkshire. The couple had been the first gay foster parents in Yorkshire. An inquiry found social workers had regarded them as 'trophy carers' and failed to respond to signs of abuse because they feared being accused of discrimination.
Gay adoption provoked a major political row in 2007 when Labour's Sexual Orientation Regulations made it unlawful for adoption agencies to refuse to help gay prospective parents. Opponents of the move included Cabinet Minister Ruth Kelly, the senior Roman Catholic leaders in England and former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey.
Earlier this year there was a fierce controversy when a Scottish couple said they were warned they would never see their two grandchildren again unless they dropped their opposition to them being adopted by a gay couple. For two years, they fought for their rights to care for the little boy and girl whose 26-year-old mother, the couple's daughter, is a recovering heroin addict. They finally agreed to an adoption but were shocked to be told the children were going to a gay household. When the grandfather protested, he said he was told: 'You can either accept it, and there's a chance you'll see them twice a year, or you can take that stance and never see them again.'
The word 'retarded' has been considered unacceptable for some years. Advice on 'disability etiquette' distributed to civil servants says it must be avoided in all circumstances. A spokesman for the British Institute for Learning Disabilities said: 'We have not used the term for at least ten years. It is not acceptable to us.' Comedian Russell Brand was strongly criticised in the U.S. last year for calling George Bush a 'retarded cowboy'.
SOURCE
CAP AND GO HUNGRY: THE TRAGIC REALITY OF GREEN BRITAIN
Millions making big sacrifices to pay utilities bills, new research confirms
Warnings of pensioners going hungry in order to heat their homes weren't over-the-top, after all, new research shows. A new report has served to confirm the fears of many consumer groups and charities - that millions of UK households are having to cut back on their food bills and other essential simply to pay for their gas and electricity.
For several months now, organisations such as Help the Aged have been shouting Cassandra-like from the wings for the government to do more to help the most vulnerable in British society, particularly the elderly who are at the greatest risk from cold weather yet who are the least able to go online and switch utilities suppliers.
Now, such claims don't appear so sensationalist, with fresh research carried out by Consumer Focus revealing that 44 per cent of customers have been forced to cut back on essential items as the average combined fuel bill stands at 1,288.
What's more, the study also found that 65 per cent of those polled were "shocked" at the size of their most recent utilities bill, with around the same proportion far from optimistic that the recently-announced price cuts from the 'big six' suppliers will make any real difference to their personal finances.
More HERE
Sales of black dolls rocket despite race row
We read:
Will this totally unscientific mania ever fade?
A children's advisor on healthy eating, Michala Forder, has been warned her son Zac is overweight and risking cancer because he is one pound over NHS guidelines.
Health officials sent a letter to Mrs Forder telling her that Zac [above], who weighs 3st 5lbs, is in danger of health problems in later life including diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure because of his weight.
Mrs Forder, a pre-school practitioner who advises children about healthy eating, said she was furious at the letter and accused Oxfordshire NHS Primary Care Trust of labelling children and potentially pushing them into crash dieting.
The trust has been weighing and measuring around 11,000 reception year pupils, aged four and five, and year six pupils, aged 10 and 11, as part of the National Child Measurement Programme. It is designed to alert parents to potential health problems. Parents can opt out of the scheme, but if they do not, they get a letter telling them if their child is underweight, a healthy weight, overweight or very overweight.
Mrs Forder, 37, from Carterton, Oxon, said she and other mothers at Edith Moorhouse Primary School, in Carterton, were angry at their children being labelled overweight. The letter indicated that Zac's ideal weight for his age and height should be between 2st 7lb and 3st 4lb.
Mrs Forder said she had not told her son about the contents of the letter, adding: "I could have told him the doctors think he is overweight. He could then take it upon himself to start on an eating disorder because of it."
The PCT apologised for any distress caused to Mrs Forder, and said it was following Department of Health guidelines on the format and content of the letter.
A spokesman for Beat, an eating disorders charity, said: "There surely has to be a better way for this information to be put across that will make things better, not worse. "Such rigid interpretation of these guidelines only serves to stigmatise children for their weight and shape."
SOURCE
British infants' classrooms 'becoming increasingly overcrowded'
A considerable irony here: It is only with the very young that small classes seem to be beneficial. The class size fetish is in general a crock, according to the research. Mandates to reduce class sizes just encourage the hiring of incompetent teachers. See here.
The number of unlawfully large classes for infants has more than doubled in two years, according to government figures released yesterday. Ten thousand pupils aged 5 to 7 are taught in classes of more than 30 children. This age group should be taught in smaller groups but the number of infant classes classed as unlawfully large has risen from 130 in 2007 to 310 this year.
David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Shadow Schools Secretary, said: "The number of children in unacceptably large classes has rocketed over recent years. These huge classes make it difficult for teachers to give our youngest children the individual attention they need when they start school.
"The situation could be even worse next year given the shortage of school places across the country. We know that smaller infant classes make a real difference. We need to be cutting class sizes to private school levels of 15."
Nick Gibb, the Tory schools spokesman, said: "The huge rise in unlawfully large class sizes underlines concern that there will not be enough primary provision to cover the likely number of children needing a place in September. "It would be a tragedy if the Government's short-term policy of reducing surplus places led to children missing their first few weeks of school."
Civitas, the think-tank, said even class sizes defined as small - under 30 - were too big, particularly when compared with other countries. An official said: "Academic research on class size defines `small' as being between 15 and 20 pupils in a class. Yet in 1997, the Government's pledge for small infant class sizes set a legal limit of 30 pupils. The Government has failed to honour even this flawed pledge by allowing infant classes over 30 in some circumstances."
Christine Blower, the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "The Government's pledge to reduce class sizes appears to be unravelling at the edges. For all those primary teachers who are now facing the impossible job of fully responding to each child's needs in excessively large classes, this deterioration is a blow both to their stress levels and to teaching and learning."
SOURCE
Big waste of money on crooked NHS doctors
Family doctors accused of misconduct are being suspended for up to four years and at a cost of up to 900,000, according to figures revealed by the NHS under the Freedom of Information Act.
Primary care trusts in England disclosed that 134 GPs have been suspended over the last three years. The trusts pay 90 per cent of the doctors' salaries during suspension, costing the NHS 8.2 million.
Norman Lamb, health spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, described the costs as scandalous. "They involve a huge waste of public money and show that the system of pursuing allegations against doctors is failing," he told The Guardian.
GPs suspected of misconduct are suspended by their primary care trust or by the General Medical Council, which regulates doctors. Trusts handle less serious cases and must seek approval if they last longer than six months. John Canning, of the British Medical Association, said that the disciplinary system can be "quite slow" to ensure that both sides have time to prepare. "But even bearing that in mind, too many cases take too long," he said.
David Stout, director of the PCT Network, said that the speed of the system coulod be frustrating. "Some of the delays are excessive, very costly and benefit nobody."
The trust for Haringey, north London, spent 1.4 million in the last three years on three GPs who were suspended. Newham, east London, spent 1.1 million on seven suspended doctors since 2006.
SOURCE
Leftist British justice boss publicly mocked as police chief slams 'Hokey Cokey' justice system
Jacqui Smith was yesterday publicly mocked by police for presiding over a `Hokey Cokey' justice system that ` let all the prisoners out'. With the Home Secretary sitting uncomfortably next to him on stage, Police Federation chairman Paul McKeever said officers are `sick to death' of seeing the same criminals again and again.
At the Federation's annual conference in Bournemouth, he added: `The Government has created the Hokey Cokey criminal justice system. `Yes, conference, it's in out, in out, let all the prisoners out. In out, in out, shake the system about.'
Mr McKeever also said officers view her with `real suspicion and distrust' after clashes over pay, pensions and workplace reform. Miss Smith was later harangued from the conference floor by rank-and-file officers about the MPs' expenses scandal and the Government's treatment of the Gurkhas.
During his speech, Mr McKeever described as a `big lie' the belief that constant modernisation and reshaping of the police will solve crime more effectively. `We and the people we serve are being failed by the rest of the criminal justice system,' he said. `A criminal justice system that isn't working and is seen by many people as being there to protect offenders' interests above the interests of law-abiding members of the public.
'Rather than addressing the real problem of ineffective sanctions, ineffective education programmes and ineffective rehabilitation, the focus is on us, the police, to detect the same people more often and bring them before the courts again and again.'
Mr McKeever said the police are left in a `constant state of flux' as politicians constantly demand change. `In effect, in the eyes of politicians, the police are the problem that needs to be solved, when the reality is that it is the criminals who are the problem and we are the solution,' he added.
It is the second year running Miss Smith has had a tough time at the conference. Last year former chairman Jan Berry taunted her with a pun about her lacking `balls'.
Both Miss Smith and Mr McKeever paid tribute to police officers who have recently been killed in the line of duty. The Federation chairman called for those who kill police to `rot' in jail for the rest of their lives.
Mr McKeever criticised the delay in awarding Detective Constable Stephen Oake - who was stabbed to death in a terror raid in 2003 - the Queen's Gallantry Medal. `We should never have to wait five years to recognise our colleagues who make the ultimate sacrifice keeping safe the communities we serve,' he said.
Miss Smith also praised the `hard work' of police during the G20 protests last month. But delegates denounced Independent Police Complaints Commission chairman Nick Hardwick, who publicly criticised officers before an investigation into their conduct at the G20 had finished.
SOURCE
Slurred by the adoption Nazis: Critics of gay parenting are branded 'retarded homophobes'
Hate speech is fine when Leftist social workers use it. The headline above is from the "Daily Mail", deliberately showing that two can play the abuse game
People who have concerns about the adoption of children by gay couples are 'retarded homophobes', the state-funded national adoption agency said yesterday. Those who protest over controversial gay adoption laws are merely 'whinging', according to the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. Its insulting description angered senior MPs and former Cabinet Ministers, Roman Catholic and Church of England leaders.
It also offended disability campaigners, who have been trying to discourage the use of the word 'retarded' for years. Whitehall has banned the word for civil servants. Many of those who are worried about gay adoption say that approving same-sex relationships goes against their Christian faith.
Mike Judge, of the Christian Institute thinktank, said last night: 'Christians are tired of being marginalised. 'We don't expect everyone to agree with us but organisations such as the BAAF should try to avoid this kind of language.' Tory MP Julian Brazier, co-chairman of the all-party Commons group on adoption and fostering, said: 'I work with BAAF all the time and I know how much they bring to adoption. 'I must say I am very sad that they should use this language about people who have an honest disagreement with them.'
Author Patricia Morgan, who has published a study of gay adoption, said: 'It is disgraceful that they do not wish to discuss the pros and cons of gay adoption. They just go in for abuse. They do not appear interested in evidence about the outcomes for children. And it is a disgusting phrase to use.'
The British Association for Adoption and Fostering sets rules and organises training for social workers across the country. Every local council with a children's services department is a paying member of the organisation, and the bulk of its 6million-a-year budget comes from the taxpayer. It runs the national adoption register for the Department of Children, Schools and Families. The 'retarded homophobe' attack was published in a BAAF guide to adoption for homosexual couples. It was repeated in its newspaper Be My Parent, which advertises children who need homes.
Would-be gay adopters were told: 'Most importantly, don't worry about society. 'Children need good parents much more than retarded homophobes need an excuse to whinge, so don't let your worries about society's reaction hinder your desire and ability to give a child a loving caring home.'
BAAF's Pink Guide to Adoption for Lesbians and Gay Men was written by Nicola Hill, a former Guardian journalist and charity worker. It was launched at a BAAF conference this week aimed at 'overcoming resistance - celebrating the role of lesbian and gay carers'. The meeting discussed 'what lesbian and gay carers can offer to the adoption and fostering process and how agencies can facilitate their contribution'. Those attending were also told that 'we will confront the challenges that such initiatives may provoke to established attitudes and assumptions'.
The BAAF's protective attitude to gay couples appears to differ from the way it deals with other people. The organisation strongly supports the legal requirement that the perceived interests of children are paramount and the wishes of would-be parents are of minor importance. It insists that children go to homes only of adoptive parents of the same race. It questions would-be adoptive couples about their views on race and says ' vigorous efforts are made to find a family that reflects the child's individual identity'.
Couples who wish to adopt are often rejected because social workers consider them too old or overweight, or because they smoke. Some have even been judged to be 'too middle class'.
Until Tony Blair's 2002 Adoption Act, children could be adopted only by married couples or single people. The new law made it possible for unmarried and gay couples to adopt. Mr Blair argued that the reform would increase the proportion of the 60,000 children in state care who win new families through adoption. But the numbers have actually fallen. Since 2004, adoptions from care have dropped from 3,800 a year to 3,200.
The great majority of those are white children. Black children are missing out because there is a shortage of black couples wishing to adopt, yet social workers oppose sending them to non-black families.
There were just 30 adoptions by gay couples and 50 by lesbian couples last year. There have been setbacks to the cause of gay parenting. In 2006, gay foster parents Craig Faunch and Ian Wathey were jailed for paedophile offences against boys at their home in Pontefract, West Yorkshire. The couple had been the first gay foster parents in Yorkshire. An inquiry found social workers had regarded them as 'trophy carers' and failed to respond to signs of abuse because they feared being accused of discrimination.
Gay adoption provoked a major political row in 2007 when Labour's Sexual Orientation Regulations made it unlawful for adoption agencies to refuse to help gay prospective parents. Opponents of the move included Cabinet Minister Ruth Kelly, the senior Roman Catholic leaders in England and former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey.
Earlier this year there was a fierce controversy when a Scottish couple said they were warned they would never see their two grandchildren again unless they dropped their opposition to them being adopted by a gay couple. For two years, they fought for their rights to care for the little boy and girl whose 26-year-old mother, the couple's daughter, is a recovering heroin addict. They finally agreed to an adoption but were shocked to be told the children were going to a gay household. When the grandfather protested, he said he was told: 'You can either accept it, and there's a chance you'll see them twice a year, or you can take that stance and never see them again.'
The word 'retarded' has been considered unacceptable for some years. Advice on 'disability etiquette' distributed to civil servants says it must be avoided in all circumstances. A spokesman for the British Institute for Learning Disabilities said: 'We have not used the term for at least ten years. It is not acceptable to us.' Comedian Russell Brand was strongly criticised in the U.S. last year for calling George Bush a 'retarded cowboy'.
SOURCE
CAP AND GO HUNGRY: THE TRAGIC REALITY OF GREEN BRITAIN
Millions making big sacrifices to pay utilities bills, new research confirms
Warnings of pensioners going hungry in order to heat their homes weren't over-the-top, after all, new research shows. A new report has served to confirm the fears of many consumer groups and charities - that millions of UK households are having to cut back on their food bills and other essential simply to pay for their gas and electricity.
For several months now, organisations such as Help the Aged have been shouting Cassandra-like from the wings for the government to do more to help the most vulnerable in British society, particularly the elderly who are at the greatest risk from cold weather yet who are the least able to go online and switch utilities suppliers.
Now, such claims don't appear so sensationalist, with fresh research carried out by Consumer Focus revealing that 44 per cent of customers have been forced to cut back on essential items as the average combined fuel bill stands at 1,288.
What's more, the study also found that 65 per cent of those polled were "shocked" at the size of their most recent utilities bill, with around the same proportion far from optimistic that the recently-announced price cuts from the 'big six' suppliers will make any real difference to their personal finances.
More HERE
Sales of black dolls rocket despite race row
We read:
"Shoppers from across the country have rushed to buy golliwogs at a store which was criticised for selling the dolls. Thing-Me-Bobs has been flooded with orders from scores of customers after the row made national headlines.
Joint manager Wendy Jee said sales of the 1.99 black-faced dolls on sticks had rocketed sincethe Ipswich and Suffolk Council for Racial Equality demanded they were pulled from shelves for being highly offensive.
But Mrs Jee said they had received a sackful of letters from supporters across the UK urging them to 'stand firm' and to 'stick to their guns'. "They have been selling very well. We had 39 come in on Friday - we put them out first thing on Saturday morning and by the end of the day they had all gone. Normally we would have expected to sell two or three a week," said Mrs Jee.
Margaret Dean, who also manages the store in Sudbury, Suffolk, said: "We have had a letter from a lady who has been to Africa where they are making and selling them. It seems to me it is the white people complaining who are going over the top being politically correct. "Everyone wants them now because they know where they can get them from."
Margaret Thatcher's daughter Carol was axed from BBC1's The One Show for using the term golliwog in a chat with a fellow presenter to refer to tennis ace Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
Source
Thursday, May 14, 2009
New Greenie hospital is useless
Greenies can mess up even such an ancient technology as central heating
A 36million hospital has been closed to patients for more than six months because the floors are too hot to walk on. Faults with the under-floor heating system at the 108-bed hospital have caused floor tiles to buckle and pushed temperatures in the wards up to 40c (104f).
Rhondda Valley Hospital in South Wales was due to admit its first patients last autumn but may not now open until next year. The hospital's opening has been delayed after temperatures inside reached 40C. Patients are instead being treated at the crumbling Victorian hospital at nearby Llwynypia even though NHS bosses said it was to close last year.
Leighton Andrews, Welsh Assembly member for the Rhondda Valleys, said: 'This was meant to be one of the most environmentally-friendly hospitals because of the nature of the heating system. 'But the underfloor heating has made the floor too hot to walk on - I understand that temperatures have reached 40C. 'It was meant to be state of the art but we are now well behind the scheduled opening date.'
The NHS-funded hospital was described as being one of the first in the UK to use sustainable resources. The underfloor heating system was championed as being environmentally-friendly because it recycles heat. But staff say they cannot control the heat of the floor in some parts of the hospital, including the corridors. One said: 'The floor is as hot as a Mediterranean beach in some spots - too hot to stand on in bare feet. 'Some spots are fine whereas others are stone cold. 'It is a bit of a farce all in all. It doesn't do much for patients faith in the NHS when it is like a bakehouse.'
The hospital was scheduled to open last autumn but is on course to be completed at least 18 months late. It was built on the site of a former factory and will have 100 rehabilitation beds and an eight-bed stroke unit - and it followed a 20-year campaign to get a new hospital. It will also house an outpatient department, minor injuries unit and an integrated primary care centre.
David Lewis, director of finance at Cwm Taf NHS Trust, said: 'We have had practical completion of the hospital and there are apparent defects in the flooring. 'We have commissioned an independent review to determine whether there are defects and, if so, what remedial action needs to be take. 'We will have this report by the end of the month and we will then know what the next step will be.'
SOURCE
Intelligent women have better sex, study reveals
This is rubbish. So-called "EQ" has very little to do with IQ and is best characterized as a personality trait with some overlay of learned skills. So touchy-feely women enjoy sex more. Big surprise!
Salovey is probably the most scholarly proponent of EQ and he has made a fairly careful psychometric study of it -- including a look at the correlation between EQ and IQ. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw what he used as his measure of IQ, however. He used the vocabulary subscale of the old Army Alpha test of World War I vintage! And he even admits to an arbitrary shortening of that subscale. One has to suspect the motivation behind such strange behaviour. Did the words he used in the vocab test tend to be related to emotional concepts? One has to expect something of that sort. Be that as it may, the correlation between EQ and IQ that he obtained (p. 146) among college students (itself a very unrepresentative sample) was .36, implying a shared variance of only 13%. That would normally be regarded as low but not too disreputable but proves little in this case. The finding amounts to saying that people who are better with words are better at getting on with people -- which is both no surprise and no proof that EQ correlates with general problem-solving ability -- which is what spiral omnibus IQ tests measure
Women with brains have more fun in bed, a study has revealed. Beauty may bag you a man - but brains will bring you more fun in the bedroom. Women blessed with 'emotional intelligence' [EQ] - the ability to express their feelings and read those of others - have better sex lives, research shows. Those most in touch with their feelings have twice as many orgasms as inhibited sorts, the study found.
The finding could lead to new ways of counselling the 40 per cent of women who find it difficult or impossible to enjoy sex fully.
Researcher Tim Spector of King's College London said there were definite advantages to being a touchy-feely type. He said: 'These findings show that emotional intelligence is an advantage in many aspects of your life, including the bedroom.'
Professor Spector questioned more than 2,000 female twins, aged between 18 and 83, about their sex lives. They were asked to rate their ability to reach orgasm on a seven-point scale, ranging from 'never' to 'always'. They also filled in a questionnaire designed to gauge their emotional intelligence and covering traits such as self expression, empathy and contentment. Those most in touch with their feelings had the most orgasms, the Journal of Sexual Medicine reports.
Lead author, psychologist Andrea Burri, also of King's College, said: 'Emotional intelligence seems to have a direct impact on women's sexual functioning by influencing her ability to communicate her sexual expectations and desires to her partner.'
SOURCE
Blood clots after surgery kill thousands because NHS staff do not appreciate the risk
Thousands of NHS patients are still dying unnecessarily because of a lack of awareness of the risk of developing fatal blood clots after an operation. The condition, venous thromboembolism (VTE), causes one in ten fatalities in British hospitals - an estimated 500 people a week, more than MRSA infections, breast cancer, HIV and road accidents combined. But only one in three NHS hospitals is properly assessing which patients are at risk, while the public are also largely unaware of the dangers, campaigners say.
As many as half of all patients going into hospital are at risk of developing VTE, which occurs when part of a deep-vein thrombosis or blood clot migrates to the lungs, heart or brain. Such clotting is common after surgery, especially in the elderly, the overweight or those confined to bed for more than three days.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued guidelines for the NHS in 2007 recommending that all patients should be assessed on admission to hospital for their risk.
But MPs say that while most patients admitted for common operations such as hip and knee replacements are now assessed by a healthcare professional or treated with anti-clotting drugs before the procedure, many other patients are not offered such preventive checks or made aware of the risks.
John Smith, chairman of the cross-party parliamentary thrombosis group, said: "Despite the Health Select Committee announcing the urgent need for action to stem the number of deaths from hospital-acquired blood clots four years ago, a third of NHS hospitals is still not carrying out proper risk-assessments on their patients."
A survey of more than 1,000 patients by the thrombosis charity Lifeblood found that fewer than one in three were concerned about the risks of VTE when going into hospital, compared to three quarters who would be concerned about contracting a "superbug" infection such as MRSA.
The Department of Health said that while routine screening of patients was not a mandatory requirement, it would consider introducing legislation if the situation did not improve.
Ann Keen, the Health Minister, said that she expected the VTE risk assessment policy to be adopted throughout the NHS and that experts were visiting every trust in England to discuss the implementation of the checks.
"We will be monitoring the position closely and formally reviewing the policy in a year's time," she added. "If there is inconsistency... or lack of commitment, we will consider making it mandatory to perform risk assessments."
Professor Beverley Hunt, Lifeblood's medical director, said that more than 70 per cent of deaths due to VTE were preventable with proper awareness and treatment. She urged all patients going into hospital for a planned operation to talk to their doctor about the risks and symptoms.
SOURCE
Opposition to homosexual clergy in the Church of Scotland
Will we see another "Disruption" (schism) akin to that of 1843? It sounds a lot like it. The reunification of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland is relatively recent in ecclesiastical terms (1929) so could perhaps be reversed. The "Wee Frees" would have the majority of the congregations this time, though
The Church of Scotland is moving towards a schism after one of its ministers compared an increasingly determined campaign against gay clergymen to the war against the Nazis. The Rev Ian Watson railed against homosexual lifestyles, declaring that such people would not "inherit the kingdom of God" in a sermon that religious leaders and politicians condemned as deeply disturbing.
Mr Watson is a prominent opponent of Scott Rennie, an openly gay minister whose appointment to a parish church last year has caused divisions. Mr Rennie, a divorced father of one, lives with his partner, David, and has the support of his Aberdeen Presbytery. The Church of Scotland is due to debate his appointment at its General Assembly next week after a petition was signed by almost a third of ministers pushing for all gays to be banned from the pulpit.
A motion has been lodged urging the Church not to "train, ordain, admit, readmit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and woman".
The row replicates the dispute within the Anglican Church about the ordination of gays. Anglican conservatives base their opposition to gay people on Bible texts that condemn homosexuality, although liberal members argue that many traditional teachings in the Bible, such as severe punishments for adultery, were no longer observed literally.
The strident position taken by Mr Watson's Forward Together organisation has provoked both condemnation and support from Scotland's religious community. The Rev Kenneth MacKenzie, the minister at Crathie Kirk, near Balmoral, which is attended by the Queen, said that he was disappointed that Mr Rennie's sexuality had become an issue but warned that a schism would occur if his appointment was confirmed. "Life in the Church will never be the same again and my fear is that a sizeable minority of the clergy, and perhaps a majority of its people, may consider leaving the church, causing a rift felt in every parish."
Mr Watson posted on his blog last night a sermon he delivered on Sunday at Kirkmuirhill Church in Lanark, in which he invoked the failure of the French Army to stand up to the Nazi annexation of the Rhineland in 1938. "[Hitler] guessed correctly that the French had no stomach for a fight. If only they had, then the tragedy of a Second World War might have been avoided," Mr Watson said.
In the following 3,500 words, he invoked Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, St Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox and the Apostle Paul as he reached his rousing climax. "To claim that the homosexual lifestyle is worthy of a child of God; to demand that a same-sex partnership be recognised as on a footing with marriage; to commend such a lifestyle to others is to deny that Jesus Christ is our only Sovereign and Lord. It is to turn the grace of God into a licence for immorality," he said. "Such people will not inherit the kingdom of God (1Cor.6:10). And therefore they must be resisted . . . Let me assure you, neither I nor like-minded minsters enjoy conflict . . . But have we learned nothing from history? Remember Hitler and the retaking of the Rhineland. He got away with it. No one stopped him. So next it was Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and then Poland and only then world war."
The sermon was greeted with outrage and disbelief by people inside and outside the Church of Scotland. Some observers questioned whether Mr Watson had infringed legislation on sexual equality. The Rev Peter Macdonald, the leader elect of the Iona Community and minister of St George's West, Edinburgh, said that he had found it deeply disturbing.
The Rev Lindsay Biddle, chaplain of Affirmation Scotland, a pro-gay group, said: "If you don't like homosexuals, then get on with it - but don't use the Bible to justify opinions." [Thus speaks a non-Christian]
Mr Watson defiantly defended his sermon last night. "There is no doubt that there is a conflict," he said. "I was trying to explain why I am engaged in this. People say to me, `This is not a hill to die on', but I think it is a fight worth fighting. "Evangelicals seek to defend the historic and orthodox Christian faith. If we don't what are we? I am a man of convictions."
SOURCE
The ever-widening gap between the BBC and those it purports to serve
The BBC's director-general Mark Thompson has said that religious broadcasting gives rise to more controversy in his job than any other subject. I am afraid he hasn't seen anything yet. On Monday, the Corporation announced that it has appointed a Muslim as head of religious broadcasting. This is not a joke, I can assure you. The person responsible for overseeing the BBC's - so far - largely Christian output will be Aaqil Ahmed, a practising Muslim.
Let me say at once that I have nothing whatsoever against Mr Ahmed, who is, I am sure, an excellent broadcaster who may have much to contribute to the coverage of religion. Some say that he has done a good job producing religious programmes in his present job at Channel 4, though he has been accused of intellectual shallowness, and last year some Roman Catholic priests alleged he had commissioned documentaries that appeared to contain a pro-Islam bias.
Nor do I doubt that Britain's three million Muslims have every right to expect the BBC to provide some religious broadcasting directly aimed at them. They pay their licence fee like everyone else, and their views should be properly and proportionately reflected in the Corporation's programming.
That said, they still constitute a small (though doubtless devout) minority of this country's population of 60 million. Some 70 per cent of adult Britons describe themselves as Christian, though a far smaller proportion regularly attend church. Culturally, this still remains a Christian country with a national Church, the Church of England, whose supreme head is Her Majesty the Queen.
I realise there are also millions of atheists, Muslims and Hindus, and a smaller number of Sikhs and Jews, who may not embrace Christian religious broadcasting. But I suspect that most of them are happy to put up with it, partly because they respect this country's Christian traditions, and partly because, in any case, the BBC is producing fewer and fewer specifically Christian programmes.
My quarrel is not so much with Mr Ahmed as with the BBC. Despite being required under its charter to provide religious programming, and despite being funded by licence-payers who overwhelmingly describe themselves as Christian, the Corporation has been increasingly pursuing what can only be, at best, described as a non-Christian agenda and, at worst, as an anti-Christian one.
Do I exaggerate? I don't believe so. Religious programming on the BBC has dwindled over the past ten years, and what remains is usually anodyne - calculated not to offend non-Christians, and therefore likely to provide very little inspiration to those who have Christian leanings. Songs Of Praise, for example, has become little more than a jolly sing-a-long with very little Christian input. A few years ago the BBC's own governors criticised the Corporation for `earlier and irregular scheduling' of this once popular programme. In others words, the BBC was attempting to marginalise it, and to a large degree it has succeeded. In a bizarre move which prefigured the appointment of Mr Ahmed, the Corporation last year made Tommy Nagra, a Sikh, the producer of Songs Of Praise. So we have a non-Christian in charge of a programme which, not at all surprisingly in the circumstances, has less and less Christian content.
Christians at the BBC appear to be surplus to requirements. During the past year, four out of seven executives in its already diminished religion department have been made redundant. These included Michael Wakelin, a Methodist preacher, who was removed as head of religious programmes to clear the way for Aaqil Ahmed. I imagine that having a Methodist preacher at the heart of the BBC was more than it could stomach.
What the Corporation does at home, it does even more blatantly abroad. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently complained to Mark Thompson at a private lunch that the BBC World Service has reduced its English-language religious coverage from one hour 45 minutes a week in 2001 to a mere half an hour a week in 2009. Half an hour! This is a highly significant reduction. For in the Third World, and particularly in Africa, there are hundreds of millions of Christians who probably yearn for more religious programmes on the BBC, and yet the grim, secular-minded commissars who oversee these matters have chosen to cut them back. The BBC does not like God, unless perhaps it be a Muslim, Hindu or Sikh version.
At every possible opportunity it will wheel forward one of those professional atheists who are not happy to live silently with their own non-belief but are determined to shove it down everyone else's throats. I am thinking particularly of the biologist Richard Dawkins, the novelist Philip Pullman and the philosopher A. C. Grayling. Can you think of a Christian biologist, novelist or philosopher who is afforded one-tenth of the airtime of these militant, omnipresent non-believers?
The odd thing is that we live in an age of growing religious conviction. Even in this country there is a small resurgence of Christianity, largely outside the mainstream churches. But the BBC is travelling fast in the opposite direction. The new intellectual orthodoxy, among the narrow group of people who control it, is profoundly anti-Christian.
Yet the Roman Catholic Mark Thompson is probably the most devoutly Christian director-general since John Reith, the first man to have the job and who, as a flinty Presbyterian, must now be spinning in his grave. Alas, in marked distinction to the militant atheists I have mentioned, Mr Thompson will not stand up for his beliefs.
Being, I trust, fairly realistic, I do not expect him to push back the encroaching secular tide that has taken over so many of the Corporation's religious programmes. But one might reasonably hope that he would at least hold the line. That line is in keeping with the BBC's obligations under its charter, and with the predilections of the Christian majority of this country. Mr Thompson will not defend it. To judge by Mr Ahmed's appointment, he did not heed the Archbishop of Canterbury's concerns at their recent lunch that the BBC is ignoring its Christian audience.
However, the director-general does not mind intervening when he sees fit. Last year he suggested that Islam should be treated more sensitively by the media because it is a minority religion in this country.
For all I know, Mr Ahmed may prove himself remarkably sympathetic to the sensibilities of Christians in his new job. One cannot, however, count on that, and it is interesting that he has said there should be more coverage of Muslim matters in the media. Will this, on the BBC, be at the expense of an already reduced number of Christian programmes?
In all kinds of ways the publicly funded BBC does not reflect the views of the public it is supposed to serve. No doubt its secular suits assume that Britain is as anti-Christian as they are. They're out of touch again. In appointing Aaqil Ahmed they do not simply offend against this country's Christian heritage and traditions. They also further weaken the hold and authority of the BBC.
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British car emissions exceed forecasts
New roads built in the UK since 2002 have led to double the increase in carbon emissions originally forecast by the government. The data, which have not been publicised, could raise questions about official assumptions on road traffic emissions resulting from Heathrow's expansion. Norman Baker - transport spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, who obtained the data - said the figures showed government concern for climate change was "little more than greenwash".
The figures come from the Highways Agency, part of the transport department, and apply to 27 big road schemes. They show that these produced an extra 21,870 tonnes of carbon - almost twice the 11,240 predicted by the government.
Mr Baker said: "This government continues to push ahead with massive road-building schemes that cost millions more than predicted, as well as increase traffic and carbon emissions. These huge schemes are responsible for thousands of tonnes of extra carbon emissions every year."
Richard George of the Campaign for Better Transport, said the figures showed that the government was not only underestimating carbon emissions but had "no workable method" of making such forecasts. "The estimates were nowhere near what actually happened, it seems they don't know how to work out what carbon emissions will be," he said. "There were some projects where they expected an increase and there was a decrease, or vice versa. "Overall it was a massive underestimate."
The Highways Agency said the figures should be put in perspective - they only showed net changes rather than total emissions produced.
However, the data might raise concerns about the prospect of enlarging Heathrow without breaching European guidelines. There were already fears about the high level of pollutants, such as nitrogen oxide, in the air around the airport - much of which comes from cars rather than aircraft. Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, has told the Financial Times that nitrogen oxide in places near Heathrow already broke limits which were about to become statutory. A report by BAA, which owns the airport, has estimated that a third runway would generate more than 10m extra car and taxi journeys each year.
Mr George did not know whether the DfT was using similar modelling for its Heathrow pollution forecasts. But he said: "It is worrying . . . I would also want to know the difference between modelling for this and for aviation work."
Geoff Hoon, transport secretary, has pledged to prevent Heathrow's expansion if air quality conditions are not met. A DfT spokesman said: "We published our decision on the third runway in January this year and at the time we highlighted the measures we would take to mitigate the environmental impact of the runway."
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UK: Science test to be abolished
The teaching of science has become absymal but rather than improve it, they shoot the messenger
Labour signalled a move away from traditional paper and pencil exams yesterday, after an expert group set up by Schools Secretary Ed Balls recommended the abolition of science exams for 11-year-olds.
The tests will end this year after advisers said they narrowed opportunities for group work and experimental-based learning. Last night there were growing calls from teaching unions for English and maths to follow suit.
The group - designed to review the way children aged seven to 14 are assessed - insisted that both would remain, but that tests should be put back a month to give children more time to work through the curriculum.
In the statement, the group said ministers "should continue to invest in, strengthen in and monitor the reliability of teacher assessment to judge whether a move away from externally marked national tests might be viable at a future date".
The move was welcomed by the National Union of Teachers and the NAHT, amid calls to go further. General secretary Christine Blower said: "If teacher assessment is judged to be good enough for science then why not other subjects?"
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Schools failing to provide education for excluded pupils, British regulator says
Almost a third of schools are failing to provide suitable education for pupils they exclude, Ofsted said today. The watchdog found some schools were hampered by transport problems and uncooperative parents, while pupil referral units (PRU) were swamped in some areas and unable to cope with the number of disruptive children sent to them. Critics said the findings showed the gap between "reality and rhetoric" for the prospects of children excluded by their schools.
Schools are legally required to arrange full-time, suitable education for pupils excluded for six days or more. It must be off site, or shared with other schools. Yet, 10 of the 36 schools scrutinised by Ofsted had not provided this, it claimed in a report.
Inspectors visited 28 secondary, five primary and three special schools, and 16 referral units, across 18 local authorities. Sixteen of the 18 authorities said that their PRU provided education for excluded pupils. However, this did not happen in practice in eight of those areas because many units were full and could not cope. The report said: "In one PRU visited, a lack of capacity meant that pupils attended for half-day sessions only. In another, a rise in permanent exclusions surprised the local authority, overwhelmed the PRU and resulted in most of the permanently excluded pupils not having access to `day six' provision. "There were delays before pupils could start: in some cases just a day, in others much longer." In two areas, this was blamed on the school's poor communication with the local authority.
Two of the schools used exclusion inappropriately as a trigger to review the placement of children with special educational needs, the report added. It added: "Weak guidance and support [from local authorities] were reflected in weak provision and, in one case, a failure to comply with the legal requirements. Two of the authorities were unable to report what their schools were doing for fixed-period excluded pupils from day six."
Transport difficulties meant that some schools kept their children on site, and educated them in isolation, rather than comply with the rules. Although this breached the legislation as it did not qualify as a PRU or as provision shared with other schools, it was in some cases better for the child, Ofsted acknowledged. It said: "Using supervisory staff who were known the the pupils also helped to maintain relationships, expectations and continuity; the schools argued that this was easier to do than if the pupils were off site in another school's provision."
And some - mainly in rural areas - chose never to exclude a child for more than five days so they would not have to risk the pupil not attending if sent to a unit far away. "All were clear that the pupils' misdemeanours warranted exclusions of more than five days, but they did not want the exclusion to impede pupils' learning, so they arranged for the child to return to school on the sixth day of the exclusion," the report said.
The report painted a picture of a breakdown of communication. Many parents were reluctant to send their children to pupil referral units because of the stigma. Some local authorities were impeded in arranging a placements by the difficulty in contacting parents. In addition, most PRUs told inspectors they were given insufficient information by schools about the pupils they were sent.
Use of funding was variable: officials in two local authorities were unsure how a government grant to establish provision for excluded pupils had been spent.
Sir Alan Steer, the government's behaviour advisor, said last year in a review commissioned by ministers: "A school that permanently excludes a child should expect to receive a permanently excluded child on the principle of `one out, one in." Yet David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Shadow Schools Secretary, said: "This shows the gap between reality and rhetoric when it comes to providing education for excluded pupils. "Ministers have promised that expelled pupils will be back in education after six days, but this is clearly not happening. There must be much broader provision for excluded pupils."
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How Gibraltar can sway UK poll results
The Rock of Gibraltar lies at the tip of Spain and overlooks the north of Africa. It is baked by the Mediterranean sun, but on 4 June it will become a town in the south-west of England, much like Falmouth or Swindon. The approximately 18,000 voters of Gibraltar will help to choose who represents South West England in the European Parliament.
Gibraltarians vote with far greater enthusiasm than their UK counterparts. The first time they got to vote in the 2004 Euro-elections, the turnout was nearly double the UK average, at 60%. Taxi drivers Wilfred Lima and Lea Manasco are true Gibraltarians - their parents and grandparents all lived on the Rock. They explain why they like to vote. "Of course voting is very popular here", says Mr Manasco. "We had to fight for it but there we are, we've got it. It's important for us, of course."
Gibraltarians only recently won the right to vote for MEPs, after gaining victory at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The British Government first opposed the move, but then decided to graft Gibraltar onto a part of the UK with similar military and naval traditions. They chose the south-west.
Mr Lima says: "Don't forget that we joined Europe in 1973, together with the Kingdom of Britain. Spain joined in 1986, so we have a right to vote now. We had to fight for the right to vote but we've got it."
The constituency is officially now South West England and Gibraltar, but the Rock's electorate makes up a tiny part of the total, around 1%. Tiny it may be, but it is important to the Chief Minister Peter Caruana. He says that having fought so hard for the vote, people are now keen to exercise that right: "Very often you know, what you get without a struggle you take for granted and what you have to struggle to get, you value it more. "So we had to go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights to get this, so it's right that we should go to the trouble of exercising it."
In a 2002 referendum 99% of the people of Gibraltar voted to oppose proposals for joint sovereignty with neighbours Spain. The vote was not officially recognised by Spain or the UK, but neither could ignore this deafening demand for the status quo.
The chief minister believes Spain's longstanding claim to Gibraltar has made its people much more likely to express themselves democratically. "Gibraltar is a small place, people are very politically switched on, very politically informed, and politics permeates all aspects of life here," he explained. "In Gibraltar we have a very high turnout tradition, and that will rub off on the European elections as well."
With its red telephone boxes and helmeted bobbies (policemen), Gibraltar looks and feels British, right down to the wafts of curry drifting down Main Street. But when it comes to voting they certainly do things differently. To help the infirm and elderly on polling days, a mobile ballot box tours the Rock, accompanied by police officers who ensure fair play. Around each of Gibraltar's 12 polling stations is painted a red line. This marks a boundary over which candidates and canvassers may not step except to vote themselves. Transgressors face arrest.
The returning officer for the South West Paul Morris enjoys witnessing such enthusiasm for democracy. He says it is the only place where he has seen queues of voters. "I've been in the elections game for 36 years", he says. "I've never yet been in a polling station anywhere in the UK, France or indeed America, where people actually queue to vote, it's an incredible concept. It's marvellous to see people taking democracy so seriously."
As Gibraltarians prepare to vote again, there is talk in some newspapers of getting an MEP all of their own. That remains an unlikely prospect in a place with such a small electorate. For now, the voters of the Rock enjoy the simple pleasure of just taking part.
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Britain's minimum wage rises by 7 pennies!: Britain's minimum wage is to increase to 5.80 an hour. The 7p rise was far less than unions had asked for. But yesterday's move, which will take effect in October, has angered business leaders who wanted a freeze on the rate to help companies cope with the economic downturn. The increase means adults working a 40-hour week will receive at least 232. From October next year, this adult minimum rate will apply to 21-year-olds as well. Their minimum wage is currently set at a lower rate - together with that of workers aged 18, 19 and 20. The Government said almost one million people will benefit from this year's increase after it approved recommendations from the independent Low Pay Commission.
"Gorbals Mick" is a disgrace to his high office: "Ministers have told Gordon Brown that the Speaker of the House of Commons must go, amid growing concern within the Labour Party that it is unable to regain the initiative on expenses from David Cameron. Downing Street said that the Prime Minister thought Michael Martin was "doing a good job". But within hours the Speaker was embroiled in his second spat with backbench MPs in 24 hours. The Speaker's latest outburst was directed at David Winnick, the Labour MP, who asked Mr Martin to apologise for the way he had attacked two MPs in the chamber on Monday. Mr Martin replied that if any MP was unhappy with him, "then he knows what he must do" - a taunt that his critics should put up or shut up. Some ministers said privately that Mr Brown must meet David Cameron and Nick Clegg as soon as possible to decide how to oust Mr Martin. "He must be handed the pearl-handled revolver," a senior member of the Government said. "He has to go. He has shown an astonishing lack of judgment." The comments are an indication of the depth of anger at Mr Martin on the government benches. Many MPs believe that the rehabilitation of Parliament's reputation cannot begin until he is removed, since the Speaker oversees the system of allowances, which is now discredited widely."
Greenies can mess up even such an ancient technology as central heating
A 36million hospital has been closed to patients for more than six months because the floors are too hot to walk on. Faults with the under-floor heating system at the 108-bed hospital have caused floor tiles to buckle and pushed temperatures in the wards up to 40c (104f).
Rhondda Valley Hospital in South Wales was due to admit its first patients last autumn but may not now open until next year. The hospital's opening has been delayed after temperatures inside reached 40C. Patients are instead being treated at the crumbling Victorian hospital at nearby Llwynypia even though NHS bosses said it was to close last year.
Leighton Andrews, Welsh Assembly member for the Rhondda Valleys, said: 'This was meant to be one of the most environmentally-friendly hospitals because of the nature of the heating system. 'But the underfloor heating has made the floor too hot to walk on - I understand that temperatures have reached 40C. 'It was meant to be state of the art but we are now well behind the scheduled opening date.'
The NHS-funded hospital was described as being one of the first in the UK to use sustainable resources. The underfloor heating system was championed as being environmentally-friendly because it recycles heat. But staff say they cannot control the heat of the floor in some parts of the hospital, including the corridors. One said: 'The floor is as hot as a Mediterranean beach in some spots - too hot to stand on in bare feet. 'Some spots are fine whereas others are stone cold. 'It is a bit of a farce all in all. It doesn't do much for patients faith in the NHS when it is like a bakehouse.'
The hospital was scheduled to open last autumn but is on course to be completed at least 18 months late. It was built on the site of a former factory and will have 100 rehabilitation beds and an eight-bed stroke unit - and it followed a 20-year campaign to get a new hospital. It will also house an outpatient department, minor injuries unit and an integrated primary care centre.
David Lewis, director of finance at Cwm Taf NHS Trust, said: 'We have had practical completion of the hospital and there are apparent defects in the flooring. 'We have commissioned an independent review to determine whether there are defects and, if so, what remedial action needs to be take. 'We will have this report by the end of the month and we will then know what the next step will be.'
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Intelligent women have better sex, study reveals
This is rubbish. So-called "EQ" has very little to do with IQ and is best characterized as a personality trait with some overlay of learned skills. So touchy-feely women enjoy sex more. Big surprise!
Salovey is probably the most scholarly proponent of EQ and he has made a fairly careful psychometric study of it -- including a look at the correlation between EQ and IQ. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw what he used as his measure of IQ, however. He used the vocabulary subscale of the old Army Alpha test of World War I vintage! And he even admits to an arbitrary shortening of that subscale. One has to suspect the motivation behind such strange behaviour. Did the words he used in the vocab test tend to be related to emotional concepts? One has to expect something of that sort. Be that as it may, the correlation between EQ and IQ that he obtained (p. 146) among college students (itself a very unrepresentative sample) was .36, implying a shared variance of only 13%. That would normally be regarded as low but not too disreputable but proves little in this case. The finding amounts to saying that people who are better with words are better at getting on with people -- which is both no surprise and no proof that EQ correlates with general problem-solving ability -- which is what spiral omnibus IQ tests measure
Women with brains have more fun in bed, a study has revealed. Beauty may bag you a man - but brains will bring you more fun in the bedroom. Women blessed with 'emotional intelligence' [EQ] - the ability to express their feelings and read those of others - have better sex lives, research shows. Those most in touch with their feelings have twice as many orgasms as inhibited sorts, the study found.
The finding could lead to new ways of counselling the 40 per cent of women who find it difficult or impossible to enjoy sex fully.
Researcher Tim Spector of King's College London said there were definite advantages to being a touchy-feely type. He said: 'These findings show that emotional intelligence is an advantage in many aspects of your life, including the bedroom.'
Professor Spector questioned more than 2,000 female twins, aged between 18 and 83, about their sex lives. They were asked to rate their ability to reach orgasm on a seven-point scale, ranging from 'never' to 'always'. They also filled in a questionnaire designed to gauge their emotional intelligence and covering traits such as self expression, empathy and contentment. Those most in touch with their feelings had the most orgasms, the Journal of Sexual Medicine reports.
Lead author, psychologist Andrea Burri, also of King's College, said: 'Emotional intelligence seems to have a direct impact on women's sexual functioning by influencing her ability to communicate her sexual expectations and desires to her partner.'
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Blood clots after surgery kill thousands because NHS staff do not appreciate the risk
Thousands of NHS patients are still dying unnecessarily because of a lack of awareness of the risk of developing fatal blood clots after an operation. The condition, venous thromboembolism (VTE), causes one in ten fatalities in British hospitals - an estimated 500 people a week, more than MRSA infections, breast cancer, HIV and road accidents combined. But only one in three NHS hospitals is properly assessing which patients are at risk, while the public are also largely unaware of the dangers, campaigners say.
As many as half of all patients going into hospital are at risk of developing VTE, which occurs when part of a deep-vein thrombosis or blood clot migrates to the lungs, heart or brain. Such clotting is common after surgery, especially in the elderly, the overweight or those confined to bed for more than three days.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued guidelines for the NHS in 2007 recommending that all patients should be assessed on admission to hospital for their risk.
But MPs say that while most patients admitted for common operations such as hip and knee replacements are now assessed by a healthcare professional or treated with anti-clotting drugs before the procedure, many other patients are not offered such preventive checks or made aware of the risks.
John Smith, chairman of the cross-party parliamentary thrombosis group, said: "Despite the Health Select Committee announcing the urgent need for action to stem the number of deaths from hospital-acquired blood clots four years ago, a third of NHS hospitals is still not carrying out proper risk-assessments on their patients."
A survey of more than 1,000 patients by the thrombosis charity Lifeblood found that fewer than one in three were concerned about the risks of VTE when going into hospital, compared to three quarters who would be concerned about contracting a "superbug" infection such as MRSA.
The Department of Health said that while routine screening of patients was not a mandatory requirement, it would consider introducing legislation if the situation did not improve.
Ann Keen, the Health Minister, said that she expected the VTE risk assessment policy to be adopted throughout the NHS and that experts were visiting every trust in England to discuss the implementation of the checks.
"We will be monitoring the position closely and formally reviewing the policy in a year's time," she added. "If there is inconsistency... or lack of commitment, we will consider making it mandatory to perform risk assessments."
Professor Beverley Hunt, Lifeblood's medical director, said that more than 70 per cent of deaths due to VTE were preventable with proper awareness and treatment. She urged all patients going into hospital for a planned operation to talk to their doctor about the risks and symptoms.
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Opposition to homosexual clergy in the Church of Scotland
Will we see another "Disruption" (schism) akin to that of 1843? It sounds a lot like it. The reunification of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland is relatively recent in ecclesiastical terms (1929) so could perhaps be reversed. The "Wee Frees" would have the majority of the congregations this time, though
The Church of Scotland is moving towards a schism after one of its ministers compared an increasingly determined campaign against gay clergymen to the war against the Nazis. The Rev Ian Watson railed against homosexual lifestyles, declaring that such people would not "inherit the kingdom of God" in a sermon that religious leaders and politicians condemned as deeply disturbing.
Mr Watson is a prominent opponent of Scott Rennie, an openly gay minister whose appointment to a parish church last year has caused divisions. Mr Rennie, a divorced father of one, lives with his partner, David, and has the support of his Aberdeen Presbytery. The Church of Scotland is due to debate his appointment at its General Assembly next week after a petition was signed by almost a third of ministers pushing for all gays to be banned from the pulpit.
A motion has been lodged urging the Church not to "train, ordain, admit, readmit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and woman".
The row replicates the dispute within the Anglican Church about the ordination of gays. Anglican conservatives base their opposition to gay people on Bible texts that condemn homosexuality, although liberal members argue that many traditional teachings in the Bible, such as severe punishments for adultery, were no longer observed literally.
The strident position taken by Mr Watson's Forward Together organisation has provoked both condemnation and support from Scotland's religious community. The Rev Kenneth MacKenzie, the minister at Crathie Kirk, near Balmoral, which is attended by the Queen, said that he was disappointed that Mr Rennie's sexuality had become an issue but warned that a schism would occur if his appointment was confirmed. "Life in the Church will never be the same again and my fear is that a sizeable minority of the clergy, and perhaps a majority of its people, may consider leaving the church, causing a rift felt in every parish."
Mr Watson posted on his blog last night a sermon he delivered on Sunday at Kirkmuirhill Church in Lanark, in which he invoked the failure of the French Army to stand up to the Nazi annexation of the Rhineland in 1938. "[Hitler] guessed correctly that the French had no stomach for a fight. If only they had, then the tragedy of a Second World War might have been avoided," Mr Watson said.
In the following 3,500 words, he invoked Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, St Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox and the Apostle Paul as he reached his rousing climax. "To claim that the homosexual lifestyle is worthy of a child of God; to demand that a same-sex partnership be recognised as on a footing with marriage; to commend such a lifestyle to others is to deny that Jesus Christ is our only Sovereign and Lord. It is to turn the grace of God into a licence for immorality," he said. "Such people will not inherit the kingdom of God (1Cor.6:10). And therefore they must be resisted . . . Let me assure you, neither I nor like-minded minsters enjoy conflict . . . But have we learned nothing from history? Remember Hitler and the retaking of the Rhineland. He got away with it. No one stopped him. So next it was Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and then Poland and only then world war."
The sermon was greeted with outrage and disbelief by people inside and outside the Church of Scotland. Some observers questioned whether Mr Watson had infringed legislation on sexual equality. The Rev Peter Macdonald, the leader elect of the Iona Community and minister of St George's West, Edinburgh, said that he had found it deeply disturbing.
The Rev Lindsay Biddle, chaplain of Affirmation Scotland, a pro-gay group, said: "If you don't like homosexuals, then get on with it - but don't use the Bible to justify opinions." [Thus speaks a non-Christian]
Mr Watson defiantly defended his sermon last night. "There is no doubt that there is a conflict," he said. "I was trying to explain why I am engaged in this. People say to me, `This is not a hill to die on', but I think it is a fight worth fighting. "Evangelicals seek to defend the historic and orthodox Christian faith. If we don't what are we? I am a man of convictions."
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The ever-widening gap between the BBC and those it purports to serve
The BBC's director-general Mark Thompson has said that religious broadcasting gives rise to more controversy in his job than any other subject. I am afraid he hasn't seen anything yet. On Monday, the Corporation announced that it has appointed a Muslim as head of religious broadcasting. This is not a joke, I can assure you. The person responsible for overseeing the BBC's - so far - largely Christian output will be Aaqil Ahmed, a practising Muslim.
Let me say at once that I have nothing whatsoever against Mr Ahmed, who is, I am sure, an excellent broadcaster who may have much to contribute to the coverage of religion. Some say that he has done a good job producing religious programmes in his present job at Channel 4, though he has been accused of intellectual shallowness, and last year some Roman Catholic priests alleged he had commissioned documentaries that appeared to contain a pro-Islam bias.
Nor do I doubt that Britain's three million Muslims have every right to expect the BBC to provide some religious broadcasting directly aimed at them. They pay their licence fee like everyone else, and their views should be properly and proportionately reflected in the Corporation's programming.
That said, they still constitute a small (though doubtless devout) minority of this country's population of 60 million. Some 70 per cent of adult Britons describe themselves as Christian, though a far smaller proportion regularly attend church. Culturally, this still remains a Christian country with a national Church, the Church of England, whose supreme head is Her Majesty the Queen.
I realise there are also millions of atheists, Muslims and Hindus, and a smaller number of Sikhs and Jews, who may not embrace Christian religious broadcasting. But I suspect that most of them are happy to put up with it, partly because they respect this country's Christian traditions, and partly because, in any case, the BBC is producing fewer and fewer specifically Christian programmes.
My quarrel is not so much with Mr Ahmed as with the BBC. Despite being required under its charter to provide religious programming, and despite being funded by licence-payers who overwhelmingly describe themselves as Christian, the Corporation has been increasingly pursuing what can only be, at best, described as a non-Christian agenda and, at worst, as an anti-Christian one.
Do I exaggerate? I don't believe so. Religious programming on the BBC has dwindled over the past ten years, and what remains is usually anodyne - calculated not to offend non-Christians, and therefore likely to provide very little inspiration to those who have Christian leanings. Songs Of Praise, for example, has become little more than a jolly sing-a-long with very little Christian input. A few years ago the BBC's own governors criticised the Corporation for `earlier and irregular scheduling' of this once popular programme. In others words, the BBC was attempting to marginalise it, and to a large degree it has succeeded. In a bizarre move which prefigured the appointment of Mr Ahmed, the Corporation last year made Tommy Nagra, a Sikh, the producer of Songs Of Praise. So we have a non-Christian in charge of a programme which, not at all surprisingly in the circumstances, has less and less Christian content.
Christians at the BBC appear to be surplus to requirements. During the past year, four out of seven executives in its already diminished religion department have been made redundant. These included Michael Wakelin, a Methodist preacher, who was removed as head of religious programmes to clear the way for Aaqil Ahmed. I imagine that having a Methodist preacher at the heart of the BBC was more than it could stomach.
What the Corporation does at home, it does even more blatantly abroad. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently complained to Mark Thompson at a private lunch that the BBC World Service has reduced its English-language religious coverage from one hour 45 minutes a week in 2001 to a mere half an hour a week in 2009. Half an hour! This is a highly significant reduction. For in the Third World, and particularly in Africa, there are hundreds of millions of Christians who probably yearn for more religious programmes on the BBC, and yet the grim, secular-minded commissars who oversee these matters have chosen to cut them back. The BBC does not like God, unless perhaps it be a Muslim, Hindu or Sikh version.
At every possible opportunity it will wheel forward one of those professional atheists who are not happy to live silently with their own non-belief but are determined to shove it down everyone else's throats. I am thinking particularly of the biologist Richard Dawkins, the novelist Philip Pullman and the philosopher A. C. Grayling. Can you think of a Christian biologist, novelist or philosopher who is afforded one-tenth of the airtime of these militant, omnipresent non-believers?
The odd thing is that we live in an age of growing religious conviction. Even in this country there is a small resurgence of Christianity, largely outside the mainstream churches. But the BBC is travelling fast in the opposite direction. The new intellectual orthodoxy, among the narrow group of people who control it, is profoundly anti-Christian.
Yet the Roman Catholic Mark Thompson is probably the most devoutly Christian director-general since John Reith, the first man to have the job and who, as a flinty Presbyterian, must now be spinning in his grave. Alas, in marked distinction to the militant atheists I have mentioned, Mr Thompson will not stand up for his beliefs.
Being, I trust, fairly realistic, I do not expect him to push back the encroaching secular tide that has taken over so many of the Corporation's religious programmes. But one might reasonably hope that he would at least hold the line. That line is in keeping with the BBC's obligations under its charter, and with the predilections of the Christian majority of this country. Mr Thompson will not defend it. To judge by Mr Ahmed's appointment, he did not heed the Archbishop of Canterbury's concerns at their recent lunch that the BBC is ignoring its Christian audience.
However, the director-general does not mind intervening when he sees fit. Last year he suggested that Islam should be treated more sensitively by the media because it is a minority religion in this country.
For all I know, Mr Ahmed may prove himself remarkably sympathetic to the sensibilities of Christians in his new job. One cannot, however, count on that, and it is interesting that he has said there should be more coverage of Muslim matters in the media. Will this, on the BBC, be at the expense of an already reduced number of Christian programmes?
In all kinds of ways the publicly funded BBC does not reflect the views of the public it is supposed to serve. No doubt its secular suits assume that Britain is as anti-Christian as they are. They're out of touch again. In appointing Aaqil Ahmed they do not simply offend against this country's Christian heritage and traditions. They also further weaken the hold and authority of the BBC.
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British car emissions exceed forecasts
New roads built in the UK since 2002 have led to double the increase in carbon emissions originally forecast by the government. The data, which have not been publicised, could raise questions about official assumptions on road traffic emissions resulting from Heathrow's expansion. Norman Baker - transport spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, who obtained the data - said the figures showed government concern for climate change was "little more than greenwash".
The figures come from the Highways Agency, part of the transport department, and apply to 27 big road schemes. They show that these produced an extra 21,870 tonnes of carbon - almost twice the 11,240 predicted by the government.
Mr Baker said: "This government continues to push ahead with massive road-building schemes that cost millions more than predicted, as well as increase traffic and carbon emissions. These huge schemes are responsible for thousands of tonnes of extra carbon emissions every year."
Richard George of the Campaign for Better Transport, said the figures showed that the government was not only underestimating carbon emissions but had "no workable method" of making such forecasts. "The estimates were nowhere near what actually happened, it seems they don't know how to work out what carbon emissions will be," he said. "There were some projects where they expected an increase and there was a decrease, or vice versa. "Overall it was a massive underestimate."
The Highways Agency said the figures should be put in perspective - they only showed net changes rather than total emissions produced.
However, the data might raise concerns about the prospect of enlarging Heathrow without breaching European guidelines. There were already fears about the high level of pollutants, such as nitrogen oxide, in the air around the airport - much of which comes from cars rather than aircraft. Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, has told the Financial Times that nitrogen oxide in places near Heathrow already broke limits which were about to become statutory. A report by BAA, which owns the airport, has estimated that a third runway would generate more than 10m extra car and taxi journeys each year.
Mr George did not know whether the DfT was using similar modelling for its Heathrow pollution forecasts. But he said: "It is worrying . . . I would also want to know the difference between modelling for this and for aviation work."
Geoff Hoon, transport secretary, has pledged to prevent Heathrow's expansion if air quality conditions are not met. A DfT spokesman said: "We published our decision on the third runway in January this year and at the time we highlighted the measures we would take to mitigate the environmental impact of the runway."
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UK: Science test to be abolished
The teaching of science has become absymal but rather than improve it, they shoot the messenger
Labour signalled a move away from traditional paper and pencil exams yesterday, after an expert group set up by Schools Secretary Ed Balls recommended the abolition of science exams for 11-year-olds.
The tests will end this year after advisers said they narrowed opportunities for group work and experimental-based learning. Last night there were growing calls from teaching unions for English and maths to follow suit.
The group - designed to review the way children aged seven to 14 are assessed - insisted that both would remain, but that tests should be put back a month to give children more time to work through the curriculum.
In the statement, the group said ministers "should continue to invest in, strengthen in and monitor the reliability of teacher assessment to judge whether a move away from externally marked national tests might be viable at a future date".
The move was welcomed by the National Union of Teachers and the NAHT, amid calls to go further. General secretary Christine Blower said: "If teacher assessment is judged to be good enough for science then why not other subjects?"
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Schools failing to provide education for excluded pupils, British regulator says
Almost a third of schools are failing to provide suitable education for pupils they exclude, Ofsted said today. The watchdog found some schools were hampered by transport problems and uncooperative parents, while pupil referral units (PRU) were swamped in some areas and unable to cope with the number of disruptive children sent to them. Critics said the findings showed the gap between "reality and rhetoric" for the prospects of children excluded by their schools.
Schools are legally required to arrange full-time, suitable education for pupils excluded for six days or more. It must be off site, or shared with other schools. Yet, 10 of the 36 schools scrutinised by Ofsted had not provided this, it claimed in a report.
Inspectors visited 28 secondary, five primary and three special schools, and 16 referral units, across 18 local authorities. Sixteen of the 18 authorities said that their PRU provided education for excluded pupils. However, this did not happen in practice in eight of those areas because many units were full and could not cope. The report said: "In one PRU visited, a lack of capacity meant that pupils attended for half-day sessions only. In another, a rise in permanent exclusions surprised the local authority, overwhelmed the PRU and resulted in most of the permanently excluded pupils not having access to `day six' provision. "There were delays before pupils could start: in some cases just a day, in others much longer." In two areas, this was blamed on the school's poor communication with the local authority.
Two of the schools used exclusion inappropriately as a trigger to review the placement of children with special educational needs, the report added. It added: "Weak guidance and support [from local authorities] were reflected in weak provision and, in one case, a failure to comply with the legal requirements. Two of the authorities were unable to report what their schools were doing for fixed-period excluded pupils from day six."
Transport difficulties meant that some schools kept their children on site, and educated them in isolation, rather than comply with the rules. Although this breached the legislation as it did not qualify as a PRU or as provision shared with other schools, it was in some cases better for the child, Ofsted acknowledged. It said: "Using supervisory staff who were known the the pupils also helped to maintain relationships, expectations and continuity; the schools argued that this was easier to do than if the pupils were off site in another school's provision."
And some - mainly in rural areas - chose never to exclude a child for more than five days so they would not have to risk the pupil not attending if sent to a unit far away. "All were clear that the pupils' misdemeanours warranted exclusions of more than five days, but they did not want the exclusion to impede pupils' learning, so they arranged for the child to return to school on the sixth day of the exclusion," the report said.
The report painted a picture of a breakdown of communication. Many parents were reluctant to send their children to pupil referral units because of the stigma. Some local authorities were impeded in arranging a placements by the difficulty in contacting parents. In addition, most PRUs told inspectors they were given insufficient information by schools about the pupils they were sent.
Use of funding was variable: officials in two local authorities were unsure how a government grant to establish provision for excluded pupils had been spent.
Sir Alan Steer, the government's behaviour advisor, said last year in a review commissioned by ministers: "A school that permanently excludes a child should expect to receive a permanently excluded child on the principle of `one out, one in." Yet David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Shadow Schools Secretary, said: "This shows the gap between reality and rhetoric when it comes to providing education for excluded pupils. "Ministers have promised that expelled pupils will be back in education after six days, but this is clearly not happening. There must be much broader provision for excluded pupils."
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How Gibraltar can sway UK poll results
The Rock of Gibraltar lies at the tip of Spain and overlooks the north of Africa. It is baked by the Mediterranean sun, but on 4 June it will become a town in the south-west of England, much like Falmouth or Swindon. The approximately 18,000 voters of Gibraltar will help to choose who represents South West England in the European Parliament.
Gibraltarians vote with far greater enthusiasm than their UK counterparts. The first time they got to vote in the 2004 Euro-elections, the turnout was nearly double the UK average, at 60%. Taxi drivers Wilfred Lima and Lea Manasco are true Gibraltarians - their parents and grandparents all lived on the Rock. They explain why they like to vote. "Of course voting is very popular here", says Mr Manasco. "We had to fight for it but there we are, we've got it. It's important for us, of course."
Gibraltarians only recently won the right to vote for MEPs, after gaining victory at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The British Government first opposed the move, but then decided to graft Gibraltar onto a part of the UK with similar military and naval traditions. They chose the south-west.
Mr Lima says: "Don't forget that we joined Europe in 1973, together with the Kingdom of Britain. Spain joined in 1986, so we have a right to vote now. We had to fight for the right to vote but we've got it."
The constituency is officially now South West England and Gibraltar, but the Rock's electorate makes up a tiny part of the total, around 1%. Tiny it may be, but it is important to the Chief Minister Peter Caruana. He says that having fought so hard for the vote, people are now keen to exercise that right: "Very often you know, what you get without a struggle you take for granted and what you have to struggle to get, you value it more. "So we had to go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights to get this, so it's right that we should go to the trouble of exercising it."
In a 2002 referendum 99% of the people of Gibraltar voted to oppose proposals for joint sovereignty with neighbours Spain. The vote was not officially recognised by Spain or the UK, but neither could ignore this deafening demand for the status quo.
The chief minister believes Spain's longstanding claim to Gibraltar has made its people much more likely to express themselves democratically. "Gibraltar is a small place, people are very politically switched on, very politically informed, and politics permeates all aspects of life here," he explained. "In Gibraltar we have a very high turnout tradition, and that will rub off on the European elections as well."
With its red telephone boxes and helmeted bobbies (policemen), Gibraltar looks and feels British, right down to the wafts of curry drifting down Main Street. But when it comes to voting they certainly do things differently. To help the infirm and elderly on polling days, a mobile ballot box tours the Rock, accompanied by police officers who ensure fair play. Around each of Gibraltar's 12 polling stations is painted a red line. This marks a boundary over which candidates and canvassers may not step except to vote themselves. Transgressors face arrest.
The returning officer for the South West Paul Morris enjoys witnessing such enthusiasm for democracy. He says it is the only place where he has seen queues of voters. "I've been in the elections game for 36 years", he says. "I've never yet been in a polling station anywhere in the UK, France or indeed America, where people actually queue to vote, it's an incredible concept. It's marvellous to see people taking democracy so seriously."
As Gibraltarians prepare to vote again, there is talk in some newspapers of getting an MEP all of their own. That remains an unlikely prospect in a place with such a small electorate. For now, the voters of the Rock enjoy the simple pleasure of just taking part.
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Britain's minimum wage rises by 7 pennies!: Britain's minimum wage is to increase to 5.80 an hour. The 7p rise was far less than unions had asked for. But yesterday's move, which will take effect in October, has angered business leaders who wanted a freeze on the rate to help companies cope with the economic downturn. The increase means adults working a 40-hour week will receive at least 232. From October next year, this adult minimum rate will apply to 21-year-olds as well. Their minimum wage is currently set at a lower rate - together with that of workers aged 18, 19 and 20. The Government said almost one million people will benefit from this year's increase after it approved recommendations from the independent Low Pay Commission.
"Gorbals Mick" is a disgrace to his high office: "Ministers have told Gordon Brown that the Speaker of the House of Commons must go, amid growing concern within the Labour Party that it is unable to regain the initiative on expenses from David Cameron. Downing Street said that the Prime Minister thought Michael Martin was "doing a good job". But within hours the Speaker was embroiled in his second spat with backbench MPs in 24 hours. The Speaker's latest outburst was directed at David Winnick, the Labour MP, who asked Mr Martin to apologise for the way he had attacked two MPs in the chamber on Monday. Mr Martin replied that if any MP was unhappy with him, "then he knows what he must do" - a taunt that his critics should put up or shut up. Some ministers said privately that Mr Brown must meet David Cameron and Nick Clegg as soon as possible to decide how to oust Mr Martin. "He must be handed the pearl-handled revolver," a senior member of the Government said. "He has to go. He has shown an astonishing lack of judgment." The comments are an indication of the depth of anger at Mr Martin on the government benches. Many MPs believe that the rehabilitation of Parliament's reputation cannot begin until he is removed, since the Speaker oversees the system of allowances, which is now discredited widely."
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Britain: A real medical hero who did what officialdom couldn't
It's a wonder that Britain's notorious health and safety bureaucracy have not prosecuted him for using an unapproved device. They would certainly have prohibited him from using it had they got wind of it in advance
There was little hope that Millie Kelly would live beyond a few weeks. Life-saving surgery on her tiny body had caused her kidneys to fail and she was too small for the hospital's dialysis equipment. But Millie was not fighting her battle to stay alive alone. Her hospital consultant, touched by her plight, went home to his garage and built a miniature dialysis machine from scratch.
After a fortnight attached to the DIY machine Millie started to show signs of improvement and is now, two years later, a fit and healthy toddler. Her consultant, paediatrician Malcolm Coulthard, is hoping a refined version of the machine he cobbled together in his garage will soon be introduced across the NHS to help other children in Millie's predicament.
She was born with gastroschisis in which the bowels develop outside the body. During surgery to return the organs to her abdomen at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne her kidneys began to fail. Without them to cleanse her blood - a process called haemodialysis - she needed a dialysis machine. However, at just over 6lb, she was too small, even for the machines designed for use on children.
'I was devastated when they said she wouldn't make it,' said Millie's mother Rebecca, 21, a student from Middlesbrough. 'We thought there was no hope and that every hour she had was a bonus. So when we heard that people at the hospital were working on a new machine we had no option but to try it. It was the only hope. 'It looked handmade and there were a few paint splodges on it but I thought, if it will save my baby's life, I have to try it.
Millie is now a picture of health thanks to Dr Coulthard, pictured here with his homemade dialysis machine that helped save his young patient's life 'Millie's kidneys weren't working at all but after 15 days on the machine she started to improve. If it were not for that machine then Millie would not be here today. She is a really lovely child.' The device meant Millie's kidneys had a chance to recover and she no longer needs any form of dialysis.
Miss Kelly added: 'Words cannot describe how grateful my family is to Dr Coulthard. 'We owe her life to him. If I won the lottery I would give it all to him, we can't thank him enough. Not only is he a great consultant but now also a great friend.'
Dr Coulthard developed his idea with senior children's kidney nurse Jean Crosier and hopes to make a new version of the machine widely available on the NHS. 'At present we will only use the pilot machine on babies where it is certain that if we don't use it they will die,' he said. He added that with a 'state-of-the-art device' which has been given a European safety or CE mark, 'we will be able to ensure that any child can benefit and it becomes the treatment of choice for any baby that needs dialysis'. A team at Newcastle's regional medical physics department is developing the new machine.
One in 7,000 births is affected by gastroschisis, in which the baby develops a hole in the abdominal wall while still in the womb. Dr Coulthard's work has been recognised with the Special Award for Sustained Endeavour at the North-East's Bright Ideas and Health Awards.
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Visit the land that creeps out even its own tourism minister
Bulgaria, Romania, Chechnya, Kazahkstan? No: Britain
Holiday in charming Britain, urges its Tourism Minister:
But for gawd’s sake watch out for the locals:
Just why Follett needs the taxpayers to fork out for all that security is another mystery, not least because it’s not as if her husband Ken (above, with Barbara), the best-selling thriller writer, is short of several tens of millions of dollars, in the New Labour way.
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Brixton: the depressing symbol of Britain's multicultural failure
By Sathnam Sanghera
The other day I went to the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton and, waiting for a friend to turn up, killed time reading a South London newspaper, which featured a piece about activists marking the tenth anniversary of the Brixton nail bomb and their campaign to stop the BNP winning seats in the European election next month. It contained the following quote from Roger Lewis, of the Lambeth branch of the trade union Unison, who lives in Brixton and heard the 1999 bomb, planted by the far-right fanatic David Copeland, explode: "The BNP are bully boys, trying to affront all minorities, and want to break up all communities. But we weren't divided ten years ago and we won't be divided now."
As a former resident of Brixton, who covered the aftermath of the explosion as a junior reporter, there was a time I would have seconded Lewis's comments about the indomitable nature of Brixton's community spirit. I drifted into the area after college, but grew to love its edginess and Benetton-advert racial diversity so much that I ended up staying eight years. It seemed life-affirming that so many people from so many different classes, professions and races could live together in a place that was for decades a byword for violent racial distress.
But I realise now I was confusing coexistence with integration. Looking back, not only were my eight years there marked by a retrospectively bewildering number of terrifying incidents, such as the two times I was mugged on my doorstep, the one time a potential flatmate was mugged on the way to inspect my flat, the several times police officers suggested I move out ("If you saw what I see, you'd get out"), the one time I went to throw away rubbish and discovered a vagrant copulating with a local prostitute in the refuse area, the bombing, the mini-riot, the numerous anti-terrorism raids, the stabbings, kneecappings and murders, but also a complete failure to make friends with any local residents. Far from being a symbol of multicultural success, Brixton is an illustration of the opposite: that if you stick lots of people from different backgrounds in one place, they will have nothing to do with one another. Go there on a Saturday and you'll find white people shopping at Tesco for groceries while black people get what they need from the market; black kids hanging out in McDonald's while white kids queue up outside the Academy; with other drinking, eating and dancing venues dividing along racial lines, too.
The last flat I lived in, for instance, was in a part of Lambeth that I described to friends as "Brixton" if I wanted to be precise and impress them with my ethnic credentials, "North Clapham" if I wanted to reassure them with my suburbanism, or "Stockwell" if I wanted to alert them to the most convenient Tube station, there was a pub at one end of the street in which I didn't once see a black person, right opposite an Ethiopian restaurant in which I didn't once see a white person. Being of an intermediate shade, I felt unwelcome in both and spent most of my time in the pub at the other end of the street, which was frequented almost entirely by young professionals.
This kind of social segmentation in London isn't a new development. In 2001, researchers at the University of East London found that, several decades after professionals started moving into London areas such as Hackney, Battersea and Islington, they still tended to socialise with each other. And Brixton was one of the London areas singled out by the research as being popular with the middle classes who claim to be fans of ethnic diversity but mingle only minimally. But the problem is getting worse the more gentrified and "regenerated" Brixton becomes.
Indeed, many of the "regeneration" projects in the area have essentially been exercises in racial cleansing, with previously black areas and establishments being turned white. The former Atlantic, which used to be a black pub, a gathering place for first-generation Jamaicans and younger Brixtonians, was closed down more than a decade ago as part of an attempt to transform the image of the area, and reopened as The Dogstar, now one of several smart venues frequented mainly by white kids.
Near my old flat, when it came for a black nightclub, the J-Bar, to have its licence renewed, the residents living in my block successfully objected. Then there's the Ritzy cinema - possibly the best in London, rebuilt as part of a 4.5 million regeneration project but, despite being one of the main buildings in the spiritual homeland of Britain's black community, the typical customer is about as black as your average member of the Women's Institute.
Does this matter? Not a huge amount. Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was right when he recently remarked that Britain is "the best place in Europe to live if you are not white". But it's depressing that groups in Britain's most diverse city still avoid one another and annoying that so many politicians and liberal journalists, among whom I must count myself, hold Brixton up as an illustration of multicultural success when it is no such thing.
I ended up getting a taxi back to North London the other night - in itself a newsworthy event as research published last year revealed Brixton is the worst place in London to hail one (it takes an average of ten minutes for a black cab to go by, compared with five minutes in the City and West End) and ended up in a conversation with the cabbie on the subject. It was interesting that when I originally moved to Brixton drivers would normally remark something along the lines of "bit rough, isn't it?" and I would respond with "it's up and coming, actually", but this time the driver remarked "it's up and coming, isn't it?" and for the first time I couldn't bring myself to agree.
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The strange transformation of the Left
Kenan Malik sees the novel "Satanic verses" by Rushdie as a turning point
In mid-February 1989, following a violent riot against the book in Pakistan, Iran's supreme leader ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers. The most famous writer of the day went into hiding, under police protection.
MUSLIM fury seemed to be driven not by questions of harassment or discrimination or poverty but by a sense of hurt that Rushdie's words had offended their deepest beliefs. Where did such hurt come from and why was it being expressed now? How could a novel create such outrage? Could Muslim anguish be assuaged, and should it be? How did the anger on the streets of Bradford relate to traditional political questions about rights, duties and entitlements? Britain had never asked itself such questions before. Twenty years on, it is still groping for the answers.
The Rushdie affair was a turning point in the relationship between British society and its Muslim communities. It was a turning point for me, too. I was born in India but came to Britain in the 1960s as a five-year-old. My mother came from Tamil Nadu in southern India. She was Hindu. My father's family had moved to India from Burma when the Japanese invaded in 1942. It is through him that I trace my Muslim heritage. Mine was not, however, a particularly religious upbringing. My parents forbade me (and my sisters) from attending religious education classes at school because they did not want us to be force-fed Christianity. But we were not force-fed Islam or Hinduism either. I still barely know the Hindu scriptures and, while I read the Koran in my youth, it was only after the Rushdie affair that I took a serious interest in it.
What shaped my early experiences was not religion but racism. I arrived in Britain just as "Paki-bashing" was becoming a national sport. Paki was the abusive name for any Asian and Paki-bashing was what racists called their pastime of beating up Asians. My main memory of growing up in the '70s was of being involved almost daily in fights with racists and of how normal it seemed to come home with a bloody nose or a black eye.
Like many Asians of my generation, I was drawn towards politics by my experience of racism. I was left-wing and, indeed, joined some far-Left organisations in my 20s. But if it was racism that drew me to politics, it was politics that made me see beyond the narrow confines of racism. I came to learn that there was more to social justice than the injustices done to me and that a person's skin colour, ethnicity or culture was no guide to the validity of their political beliefs. I was introduced to the ideas of the Enlightenment and to concepts of a common humanity and universal rights. Through politics, too, I discovered the writings of Marx and Mill, Kant and Locke, Paine and Condorcet, Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James.
By the end of the '80s, however, many of my friends had come to see such Enlightenment notions as dangerously naive. The Rushdie affair gave notice not just of a new Islam but also of a new Left. Radicals slowly lost faith in secular universalism and began talking instead about multiculturalism and group rights. They became disenchanted with Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and humanism, and many began to decry the Enlightenment as a Eurocentric project. Where once the Left had argued that everyone should be treated equally, despite their differences, now it pushed the idea that different people should be treated differently because of such differences. During the past two decades many of the ideas of the so-called politics of difference have become mainstream through the policies of multiculturalism. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics, these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, anti-racist outlook and as the foundation stones of modern liberal democracies.
Yet there is a much darker side to multiculturalism, as the Rushdie affair demonstrated. Multiculturalism has helped foster a more tribal nation and, within Muslim communities, has undermined progressive trends while strengthening the hand of conservative religious leaders. Although it did not create militant Islam, it helped create for it a space within British Muslim communities that had not existed before.
I was in a drab Victorian semi near the university that housed the Bradford Council of Mosques, waiting to speak to Sher Azam, when suddenly, I heard a familiar voice. "Hello, Kenan, what are you doing here?" It was Hassan, a friend from London whom I had not seen for more than a year. "I'm doing some interviews about Rushdie," I told him. "But what are you doing in this godforsaken place?"
Hassan laughed. "Trying to make it less godforsaken," he said. "I've been up here a few months, helping in the campaign against Rushdie." Then he laughed again when he saw my face. "No need to look so shocked," he said. He had had it with the "white Left". He had, he said, lost his sense of who he was and where he had come from. So he had returned to Bradford to try to rediscover it. And what he had found was a sense of community and a "need to defend our dignity as Muslims, to defend our values and beliefs". He was not going to allow anyone -- "racist or Rushdie" -- to trample over them.
The Hassan I had known in London had been a member of the far-left Socialist Workers Party (as I had been for a while). Apart from Trotskyism, his other indulgences were Southern Comfort, sex and the Arsenal soccer club. We had watched the Specials and the Clash together, smoked dope and argued about football. We had marched together, chucked bricks at the National Front, been arrested. This was what it was like for many Asians growing up in Britain in the '80s. Hassan had been born, as I had, on the subcontinent (in Pakistan) but grew up in Britain. His parents were observant Muslims but, like many of their generation, visited the mosque only whenever the "Friday feeling" gripped them. Hassan had attended mosque as a child and learned the Koran, but by the time he left school God had left him. "There's a hole inside me where God used to be," Rushdie once said. I had never detected any such hole in Hassan. He seemed to have been hewn from secular rock.
But here he was in Bradford, an errand boy to the mullahs, inspired by book-burners, willing to shed blood for a 1000-year-old fable he had never believed in. Unlike Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, Hassan sported neither horns nor a halo. But his metamorphosis from left-wing wide boy to Islamic militant was no less extraordinary than that of the antiheroes of The Satanic Verses. In that metamorphosis lies the story of the wider changes that were taking place in Britain and other Western nations, changes that made possible not just the Rushdie affair but eventually 9/11 and the London terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005, changes that trace a road from fatwa to jihad.
ANGELS and devils. Myths and monsters. These are at the heart of The Satanic Verses. The struggle of Saladin and Gibreel, with themselves and with each other, is a struggle of the human imagination against the constraints placed on it. One is a devil, the other an angel, yet they continually betray their natures. When Saladin is arrested, Gibreel, the angel, refuses to help him. When the two meet up again in riot-torn east London, Gibreel appears as Azraeel, the most terrible of angels, wreaking fire and destruction. But even as he is hunted down by Gibreel, the demonic Saladin risks his life to save a family trapped in a burning house. What Rushdie wants us to see is that the distinction between devil and angel lies less in their inner selves than in the roles that humans ascribe to them. If religion creates the divine and the satanic in the image of man, secular society makes men in the image of devils and angels. Religious faiths as well as secular societies deploy their angels and demons to justify their otherwise unjustifiable actions, to create boundaries that cannot be transgressed.
"Angels and devils -- who needed them?" Rushdie asks in The Satanic Verses. The answer seems to be those who wish to subdue the human spirit. Gibreel, despite born-again slogans, new beginnings, metamorphoses, has wished to remain, to a large extent, continuous, joined to and arising from the past. Saladin, on the other hand, has shown a willing reinvention, a preferred revolt against history. Angels, in other words, mean constancy while devils rock the boat. Angels are used to maintain tradition while those who bring about unacceptable change -- secularists to a religious faith, immigrants in a secular society -- are demonised.
But change and transformation, Rushdie insists, are what make us human. "Human beings," he observed in an essay, In Good Faith, "understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee, whether to gods or to men." The Satanic Verses, he has said, is a "work of radical dissent". What does it dissent from? "From the end of debate, of dispute, of dissent," Rushdie answers. Rushdie's sympathy is clearly with the devil.
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The scum that illegal immigration brings to Britain
Adult "asylum seeker" raped girl,13, after he lied about age and was placed in children's home
Birmingham City Council are said to be 'cooperating with police investigations in relation to a young person'. An asylum-seeker has been arrested after the alleged rape of a young girl from a children's home where he had been placed after apparently lying about his age.
The Afghan presented himself to Birmingham Social Services and claimed he was a 13 year-old minor, but staff suspected he was really over 18. He was placed at the council-run children's home after producing medical evidence at an immigration hearing which seemingly backed his claims of being a child. But the Afghan was later arrested following the suspected rape of a 13-year-old girl from the care home and police found an immigration card which appeared to confirm that he was really 19. Social services have now begun an investigation after the asylum-seeker was quizzed about the suspected sex attack, a case which has seen another adult charged with rape.
'The Afghan presented himself some time ago as a minor, seeking asylum,' said a source. 'He claimed to be 13 years old but from the outset social services had doubts. 'Yet if someone's an asylum-seeker and a minor then social services are duty bound to look after them. 'Birmingham social services' experts were involved in challenging his claim that he was 13 at two immigration hearings and at one hearing he was legally declared an adult. 'But at an appeal he produced a letter from a doctor claiming he had some characteristics of a child, so the court had to accept he was a child.'
The asylum-seeker is currently on police bail after being arrested on suspicion of the rape, which is alleged to have occurred in Birmingham last month. Two youths in their late teens were also detained by police. One was later charged with rape and remanded in custody after appearing before Midland magistrates, while the other has also been released on police bail.
The Afghan has now been moved to a 'specialist placement' while police inquiries continue into the alleged rape, as well as his true age. 'The truth is we just don't know how old he is for sure,' said one source. 'Most think he is an adult over the age of 18. It's proving it that has been the problem.'
A Birmingham City Council spokesman said: 'We are cooperating with police investigations in relation to a young person and these investigations are ongoing. 'People referred without documents to support their age present difficulties to all local authorities. 'The Local Authority seeks to verify information through medical and social work assessments and in the interim makes appropriate arrangements for the young people concerned.'
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MEDIA COOLING: BBC TO AXE GREEN JOBS
Newsnight is facing a 15% budget cut and two BBC environment and science reporters will also lose their jobs as part of BBC News's latest round of job losses. BBC News insiders are said to be "horrified" by the proposals, which were put to the Newsnight and science and environment teams along with the rest of the division's staff earlier this week. Newsnight is expected to make a 15% budget reduction as part of the cuts.
The BBC2 programme's culture correspondents, Madeleine Holt and Steve Smith, will become general reporters. One general reporter will then be lost from the programme's pool of around seven in total.
The two science and environment jobs will disappear as part of a plan to cut 88.5 posts from BBC News by next April as part of the corporation's five-year saving plan announced in 2007 aiming to save 155m. BBC News's team of science and environment correspondents includes Roger Harrabin, David Shukman, Christine McGourty, Pallab Ghosh, Sarah Mukherjee and Jeremy Cooke, all of whom report for various news programmes across BBC TV and radio services.
"The science and environment beat is a massive growth area and the reporting team are pre-eminent so many there are puzzled to say the very least about it," said a BBC source. "It needs expertise for these stories, a lot of preparation needs to be put in, and to lose two reporters in one go is madness."
The source also pointed at the "huge irony" of the decision given the "importance the organisation places on climate change as part of the news agenda".
More HERE
BRITAIN'S 'GREEN' POWER PLANTS MAY HELP DESTROY RAINFORESTS
The operators of Britain's first "biofuel" power plants are considering burning palm oil, which is blamed for causing rainforest destruction in south-east Asia.
At least four new power stations are being planned around the UK to burn vegetable oils with the assurance that they will generate less pollution than burning climate-change-causing fossil fuels. Two that would power more than 50,000 homes, at Portland in Dorset and Newport in South Wales, are considering using palm oil.
W4B Energy, which has submitted a planning application to build the 30m Portland plant, says it would use only sustainable supplies certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Vogen Energy, behind the plant at Newport, says production of its palm oil would not harm the environment.
More HERE
Amazing educational realism from Britain
Middle class children are more likely to be clever because they have better genes, according to the former chief inspector of schools. The science has been showing that for decades but to have an educator admit to it is quite a breakthrough
Chris Woodhead, who became the scourge of the teaching profession in the 1990s, said that grammar school pupils would be less likely to come from impoverished backgrounds than the children of teachers, academics and lawyers. The former teacher, known for his frank views, said that middle class children were not only born with better genes but were also more likely to be better nurtured.
He said some children were simply born 'not very bright,' and that politicians should allow them to follow practical educational courses rather than forcing conventional teaching on them. He said there can still be exceptional working-class students, however, such as writer DH Lawrence, who came from a humble background.
Referring to a paper by the novelist, who wrote about a boy named Jimmy who was not very bright, he asked: 'Why do we think that we can make him brighter than God made him?'.
Mr Woodhead, who once demanded that 15,000 incompetent teachers be sacked, argued that the Labour Government had betrayed children by denying that some weren't suited to formal education, and creating a system designed to make learning 'accessible' and 'personalised' rather than rigorous. 'I've taught, and I can still remember trying to interest children who had no interest whatsoever in English,' he said. 'They didn't want to be in the classroom. If I'm honest I didn't want them to be there either because they were disruptive to children who did want to learn.
'What was the point? If we had had a system whereby those young people were able to follow practical educational courses that gave them a sense of worth, a sense that they weren't dull and less intelligent than others, it would have been much better for them.'
Speaking to the Guardian, Mr Woodhead suggested giving all children a basic primary education, like reading, writing and maths, and then sending them to a selective secondary system. He recommends education vouchers so that schools that failed to perform would have to change or eventually close.
Mr Woodhead, who suffers from motor neurone disease but continues to chair Cognita, a company that runs independent schools, admits that this system would not be entirely fair. 'Life isn't fair,' he said. 'We're never going to make it fair.'
SOURCE
It's a wonder that Britain's notorious health and safety bureaucracy have not prosecuted him for using an unapproved device. They would certainly have prohibited him from using it had they got wind of it in advance
There was little hope that Millie Kelly would live beyond a few weeks. Life-saving surgery on her tiny body had caused her kidneys to fail and she was too small for the hospital's dialysis equipment. But Millie was not fighting her battle to stay alive alone. Her hospital consultant, touched by her plight, went home to his garage and built a miniature dialysis machine from scratch.
After a fortnight attached to the DIY machine Millie started to show signs of improvement and is now, two years later, a fit and healthy toddler. Her consultant, paediatrician Malcolm Coulthard, is hoping a refined version of the machine he cobbled together in his garage will soon be introduced across the NHS to help other children in Millie's predicament.
She was born with gastroschisis in which the bowels develop outside the body. During surgery to return the organs to her abdomen at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne her kidneys began to fail. Without them to cleanse her blood - a process called haemodialysis - she needed a dialysis machine. However, at just over 6lb, she was too small, even for the machines designed for use on children.
'I was devastated when they said she wouldn't make it,' said Millie's mother Rebecca, 21, a student from Middlesbrough. 'We thought there was no hope and that every hour she had was a bonus. So when we heard that people at the hospital were working on a new machine we had no option but to try it. It was the only hope. 'It looked handmade and there were a few paint splodges on it but I thought, if it will save my baby's life, I have to try it.
Millie is now a picture of health thanks to Dr Coulthard, pictured here with his homemade dialysis machine that helped save his young patient's life 'Millie's kidneys weren't working at all but after 15 days on the machine she started to improve. If it were not for that machine then Millie would not be here today. She is a really lovely child.' The device meant Millie's kidneys had a chance to recover and she no longer needs any form of dialysis.
Miss Kelly added: 'Words cannot describe how grateful my family is to Dr Coulthard. 'We owe her life to him. If I won the lottery I would give it all to him, we can't thank him enough. Not only is he a great consultant but now also a great friend.'
Dr Coulthard developed his idea with senior children's kidney nurse Jean Crosier and hopes to make a new version of the machine widely available on the NHS. 'At present we will only use the pilot machine on babies where it is certain that if we don't use it they will die,' he said. He added that with a 'state-of-the-art device' which has been given a European safety or CE mark, 'we will be able to ensure that any child can benefit and it becomes the treatment of choice for any baby that needs dialysis'. A team at Newcastle's regional medical physics department is developing the new machine.
One in 7,000 births is affected by gastroschisis, in which the baby develops a hole in the abdominal wall while still in the womb. Dr Coulthard's work has been recognised with the Special Award for Sustained Endeavour at the North-East's Bright Ideas and Health Awards.
SOURCE
Visit the land that creeps out even its own tourism minister
Bulgaria, Romania, Chechnya, Kazahkstan? No: Britain
Holiday in charming Britain, urges its Tourism Minister:
Tourism minister Barbara Follett backed a campaign today to encourage people to holiday in Britain.
But for gawd’s sake watch out for the locals:
Tourism minister Barbara Follett claimed more than 25,000 for security patrols outside her London home because she did not feel safe there… The Telegraph says Mrs Follett demanded extra protection at her ‘second home’, a four-storey property in Soho, because she had been mugged and followed by a stalker.
Just why Follett needs the taxpayers to fork out for all that security is another mystery, not least because it’s not as if her husband Ken (above, with Barbara), the best-selling thriller writer, is short of several tens of millions of dollars, in the New Labour way.
SOURCE
Brixton: the depressing symbol of Britain's multicultural failure
By Sathnam Sanghera
The other day I went to the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton and, waiting for a friend to turn up, killed time reading a South London newspaper, which featured a piece about activists marking the tenth anniversary of the Brixton nail bomb and their campaign to stop the BNP winning seats in the European election next month. It contained the following quote from Roger Lewis, of the Lambeth branch of the trade union Unison, who lives in Brixton and heard the 1999 bomb, planted by the far-right fanatic David Copeland, explode: "The BNP are bully boys, trying to affront all minorities, and want to break up all communities. But we weren't divided ten years ago and we won't be divided now."
As a former resident of Brixton, who covered the aftermath of the explosion as a junior reporter, there was a time I would have seconded Lewis's comments about the indomitable nature of Brixton's community spirit. I drifted into the area after college, but grew to love its edginess and Benetton-advert racial diversity so much that I ended up staying eight years. It seemed life-affirming that so many people from so many different classes, professions and races could live together in a place that was for decades a byword for violent racial distress.
But I realise now I was confusing coexistence with integration. Looking back, not only were my eight years there marked by a retrospectively bewildering number of terrifying incidents, such as the two times I was mugged on my doorstep, the one time a potential flatmate was mugged on the way to inspect my flat, the several times police officers suggested I move out ("If you saw what I see, you'd get out"), the one time I went to throw away rubbish and discovered a vagrant copulating with a local prostitute in the refuse area, the bombing, the mini-riot, the numerous anti-terrorism raids, the stabbings, kneecappings and murders, but also a complete failure to make friends with any local residents. Far from being a symbol of multicultural success, Brixton is an illustration of the opposite: that if you stick lots of people from different backgrounds in one place, they will have nothing to do with one another. Go there on a Saturday and you'll find white people shopping at Tesco for groceries while black people get what they need from the market; black kids hanging out in McDonald's while white kids queue up outside the Academy; with other drinking, eating and dancing venues dividing along racial lines, too.
The last flat I lived in, for instance, was in a part of Lambeth that I described to friends as "Brixton" if I wanted to be precise and impress them with my ethnic credentials, "North Clapham" if I wanted to reassure them with my suburbanism, or "Stockwell" if I wanted to alert them to the most convenient Tube station, there was a pub at one end of the street in which I didn't once see a black person, right opposite an Ethiopian restaurant in which I didn't once see a white person. Being of an intermediate shade, I felt unwelcome in both and spent most of my time in the pub at the other end of the street, which was frequented almost entirely by young professionals.
This kind of social segmentation in London isn't a new development. In 2001, researchers at the University of East London found that, several decades after professionals started moving into London areas such as Hackney, Battersea and Islington, they still tended to socialise with each other. And Brixton was one of the London areas singled out by the research as being popular with the middle classes who claim to be fans of ethnic diversity but mingle only minimally. But the problem is getting worse the more gentrified and "regenerated" Brixton becomes.
Indeed, many of the "regeneration" projects in the area have essentially been exercises in racial cleansing, with previously black areas and establishments being turned white. The former Atlantic, which used to be a black pub, a gathering place for first-generation Jamaicans and younger Brixtonians, was closed down more than a decade ago as part of an attempt to transform the image of the area, and reopened as The Dogstar, now one of several smart venues frequented mainly by white kids.
Near my old flat, when it came for a black nightclub, the J-Bar, to have its licence renewed, the residents living in my block successfully objected. Then there's the Ritzy cinema - possibly the best in London, rebuilt as part of a 4.5 million regeneration project but, despite being one of the main buildings in the spiritual homeland of Britain's black community, the typical customer is about as black as your average member of the Women's Institute.
Does this matter? Not a huge amount. Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was right when he recently remarked that Britain is "the best place in Europe to live if you are not white". But it's depressing that groups in Britain's most diverse city still avoid one another and annoying that so many politicians and liberal journalists, among whom I must count myself, hold Brixton up as an illustration of multicultural success when it is no such thing.
I ended up getting a taxi back to North London the other night - in itself a newsworthy event as research published last year revealed Brixton is the worst place in London to hail one (it takes an average of ten minutes for a black cab to go by, compared with five minutes in the City and West End) and ended up in a conversation with the cabbie on the subject. It was interesting that when I originally moved to Brixton drivers would normally remark something along the lines of "bit rough, isn't it?" and I would respond with "it's up and coming, actually", but this time the driver remarked "it's up and coming, isn't it?" and for the first time I couldn't bring myself to agree.
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The strange transformation of the Left
Kenan Malik sees the novel "Satanic verses" by Rushdie as a turning point
In mid-February 1989, following a violent riot against the book in Pakistan, Iran's supreme leader ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers. The most famous writer of the day went into hiding, under police protection.
MUSLIM fury seemed to be driven not by questions of harassment or discrimination or poverty but by a sense of hurt that Rushdie's words had offended their deepest beliefs. Where did such hurt come from and why was it being expressed now? How could a novel create such outrage? Could Muslim anguish be assuaged, and should it be? How did the anger on the streets of Bradford relate to traditional political questions about rights, duties and entitlements? Britain had never asked itself such questions before. Twenty years on, it is still groping for the answers.
The Rushdie affair was a turning point in the relationship between British society and its Muslim communities. It was a turning point for me, too. I was born in India but came to Britain in the 1960s as a five-year-old. My mother came from Tamil Nadu in southern India. She was Hindu. My father's family had moved to India from Burma when the Japanese invaded in 1942. It is through him that I trace my Muslim heritage. Mine was not, however, a particularly religious upbringing. My parents forbade me (and my sisters) from attending religious education classes at school because they did not want us to be force-fed Christianity. But we were not force-fed Islam or Hinduism either. I still barely know the Hindu scriptures and, while I read the Koran in my youth, it was only after the Rushdie affair that I took a serious interest in it.
What shaped my early experiences was not religion but racism. I arrived in Britain just as "Paki-bashing" was becoming a national sport. Paki was the abusive name for any Asian and Paki-bashing was what racists called their pastime of beating up Asians. My main memory of growing up in the '70s was of being involved almost daily in fights with racists and of how normal it seemed to come home with a bloody nose or a black eye.
Like many Asians of my generation, I was drawn towards politics by my experience of racism. I was left-wing and, indeed, joined some far-Left organisations in my 20s. But if it was racism that drew me to politics, it was politics that made me see beyond the narrow confines of racism. I came to learn that there was more to social justice than the injustices done to me and that a person's skin colour, ethnicity or culture was no guide to the validity of their political beliefs. I was introduced to the ideas of the Enlightenment and to concepts of a common humanity and universal rights. Through politics, too, I discovered the writings of Marx and Mill, Kant and Locke, Paine and Condorcet, Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James.
By the end of the '80s, however, many of my friends had come to see such Enlightenment notions as dangerously naive. The Rushdie affair gave notice not just of a new Islam but also of a new Left. Radicals slowly lost faith in secular universalism and began talking instead about multiculturalism and group rights. They became disenchanted with Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and humanism, and many began to decry the Enlightenment as a Eurocentric project. Where once the Left had argued that everyone should be treated equally, despite their differences, now it pushed the idea that different people should be treated differently because of such differences. During the past two decades many of the ideas of the so-called politics of difference have become mainstream through the policies of multiculturalism. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics, these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, anti-racist outlook and as the foundation stones of modern liberal democracies.
Yet there is a much darker side to multiculturalism, as the Rushdie affair demonstrated. Multiculturalism has helped foster a more tribal nation and, within Muslim communities, has undermined progressive trends while strengthening the hand of conservative religious leaders. Although it did not create militant Islam, it helped create for it a space within British Muslim communities that had not existed before.
I was in a drab Victorian semi near the university that housed the Bradford Council of Mosques, waiting to speak to Sher Azam, when suddenly, I heard a familiar voice. "Hello, Kenan, what are you doing here?" It was Hassan, a friend from London whom I had not seen for more than a year. "I'm doing some interviews about Rushdie," I told him. "But what are you doing in this godforsaken place?"
Hassan laughed. "Trying to make it less godforsaken," he said. "I've been up here a few months, helping in the campaign against Rushdie." Then he laughed again when he saw my face. "No need to look so shocked," he said. He had had it with the "white Left". He had, he said, lost his sense of who he was and where he had come from. So he had returned to Bradford to try to rediscover it. And what he had found was a sense of community and a "need to defend our dignity as Muslims, to defend our values and beliefs". He was not going to allow anyone -- "racist or Rushdie" -- to trample over them.
The Hassan I had known in London had been a member of the far-left Socialist Workers Party (as I had been for a while). Apart from Trotskyism, his other indulgences were Southern Comfort, sex and the Arsenal soccer club. We had watched the Specials and the Clash together, smoked dope and argued about football. We had marched together, chucked bricks at the National Front, been arrested. This was what it was like for many Asians growing up in Britain in the '80s. Hassan had been born, as I had, on the subcontinent (in Pakistan) but grew up in Britain. His parents were observant Muslims but, like many of their generation, visited the mosque only whenever the "Friday feeling" gripped them. Hassan had attended mosque as a child and learned the Koran, but by the time he left school God had left him. "There's a hole inside me where God used to be," Rushdie once said. I had never detected any such hole in Hassan. He seemed to have been hewn from secular rock.
But here he was in Bradford, an errand boy to the mullahs, inspired by book-burners, willing to shed blood for a 1000-year-old fable he had never believed in. Unlike Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, Hassan sported neither horns nor a halo. But his metamorphosis from left-wing wide boy to Islamic militant was no less extraordinary than that of the antiheroes of The Satanic Verses. In that metamorphosis lies the story of the wider changes that were taking place in Britain and other Western nations, changes that made possible not just the Rushdie affair but eventually 9/11 and the London terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005, changes that trace a road from fatwa to jihad.
ANGELS and devils. Myths and monsters. These are at the heart of The Satanic Verses. The struggle of Saladin and Gibreel, with themselves and with each other, is a struggle of the human imagination against the constraints placed on it. One is a devil, the other an angel, yet they continually betray their natures. When Saladin is arrested, Gibreel, the angel, refuses to help him. When the two meet up again in riot-torn east London, Gibreel appears as Azraeel, the most terrible of angels, wreaking fire and destruction. But even as he is hunted down by Gibreel, the demonic Saladin risks his life to save a family trapped in a burning house. What Rushdie wants us to see is that the distinction between devil and angel lies less in their inner selves than in the roles that humans ascribe to them. If religion creates the divine and the satanic in the image of man, secular society makes men in the image of devils and angels. Religious faiths as well as secular societies deploy their angels and demons to justify their otherwise unjustifiable actions, to create boundaries that cannot be transgressed.
"Angels and devils -- who needed them?" Rushdie asks in The Satanic Verses. The answer seems to be those who wish to subdue the human spirit. Gibreel, despite born-again slogans, new beginnings, metamorphoses, has wished to remain, to a large extent, continuous, joined to and arising from the past. Saladin, on the other hand, has shown a willing reinvention, a preferred revolt against history. Angels, in other words, mean constancy while devils rock the boat. Angels are used to maintain tradition while those who bring about unacceptable change -- secularists to a religious faith, immigrants in a secular society -- are demonised.
But change and transformation, Rushdie insists, are what make us human. "Human beings," he observed in an essay, In Good Faith, "understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee, whether to gods or to men." The Satanic Verses, he has said, is a "work of radical dissent". What does it dissent from? "From the end of debate, of dispute, of dissent," Rushdie answers. Rushdie's sympathy is clearly with the devil.
SOURCE
The scum that illegal immigration brings to Britain
Adult "asylum seeker" raped girl,13, after he lied about age and was placed in children's home
Birmingham City Council are said to be 'cooperating with police investigations in relation to a young person'. An asylum-seeker has been arrested after the alleged rape of a young girl from a children's home where he had been placed after apparently lying about his age.
The Afghan presented himself to Birmingham Social Services and claimed he was a 13 year-old minor, but staff suspected he was really over 18. He was placed at the council-run children's home after producing medical evidence at an immigration hearing which seemingly backed his claims of being a child. But the Afghan was later arrested following the suspected rape of a 13-year-old girl from the care home and police found an immigration card which appeared to confirm that he was really 19. Social services have now begun an investigation after the asylum-seeker was quizzed about the suspected sex attack, a case which has seen another adult charged with rape.
'The Afghan presented himself some time ago as a minor, seeking asylum,' said a source. 'He claimed to be 13 years old but from the outset social services had doubts. 'Yet if someone's an asylum-seeker and a minor then social services are duty bound to look after them. 'Birmingham social services' experts were involved in challenging his claim that he was 13 at two immigration hearings and at one hearing he was legally declared an adult. 'But at an appeal he produced a letter from a doctor claiming he had some characteristics of a child, so the court had to accept he was a child.'
The asylum-seeker is currently on police bail after being arrested on suspicion of the rape, which is alleged to have occurred in Birmingham last month. Two youths in their late teens were also detained by police. One was later charged with rape and remanded in custody after appearing before Midland magistrates, while the other has also been released on police bail.
The Afghan has now been moved to a 'specialist placement' while police inquiries continue into the alleged rape, as well as his true age. 'The truth is we just don't know how old he is for sure,' said one source. 'Most think he is an adult over the age of 18. It's proving it that has been the problem.'
A Birmingham City Council spokesman said: 'We are cooperating with police investigations in relation to a young person and these investigations are ongoing. 'People referred without documents to support their age present difficulties to all local authorities. 'The Local Authority seeks to verify information through medical and social work assessments and in the interim makes appropriate arrangements for the young people concerned.'
SOURCE
MEDIA COOLING: BBC TO AXE GREEN JOBS
Newsnight is facing a 15% budget cut and two BBC environment and science reporters will also lose their jobs as part of BBC News's latest round of job losses. BBC News insiders are said to be "horrified" by the proposals, which were put to the Newsnight and science and environment teams along with the rest of the division's staff earlier this week. Newsnight is expected to make a 15% budget reduction as part of the cuts.
The BBC2 programme's culture correspondents, Madeleine Holt and Steve Smith, will become general reporters. One general reporter will then be lost from the programme's pool of around seven in total.
The two science and environment jobs will disappear as part of a plan to cut 88.5 posts from BBC News by next April as part of the corporation's five-year saving plan announced in 2007 aiming to save 155m. BBC News's team of science and environment correspondents includes Roger Harrabin, David Shukman, Christine McGourty, Pallab Ghosh, Sarah Mukherjee and Jeremy Cooke, all of whom report for various news programmes across BBC TV and radio services.
"The science and environment beat is a massive growth area and the reporting team are pre-eminent so many there are puzzled to say the very least about it," said a BBC source. "It needs expertise for these stories, a lot of preparation needs to be put in, and to lose two reporters in one go is madness."
The source also pointed at the "huge irony" of the decision given the "importance the organisation places on climate change as part of the news agenda".
More HERE
BRITAIN'S 'GREEN' POWER PLANTS MAY HELP DESTROY RAINFORESTS
The operators of Britain's first "biofuel" power plants are considering burning palm oil, which is blamed for causing rainforest destruction in south-east Asia.
At least four new power stations are being planned around the UK to burn vegetable oils with the assurance that they will generate less pollution than burning climate-change-causing fossil fuels. Two that would power more than 50,000 homes, at Portland in Dorset and Newport in South Wales, are considering using palm oil.
W4B Energy, which has submitted a planning application to build the 30m Portland plant, says it would use only sustainable supplies certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Vogen Energy, behind the plant at Newport, says production of its palm oil would not harm the environment.
More HERE
Amazing educational realism from Britain
Middle class children are more likely to be clever because they have better genes, according to the former chief inspector of schools. The science has been showing that for decades but to have an educator admit to it is quite a breakthrough
Chris Woodhead, who became the scourge of the teaching profession in the 1990s, said that grammar school pupils would be less likely to come from impoverished backgrounds than the children of teachers, academics and lawyers. The former teacher, known for his frank views, said that middle class children were not only born with better genes but were also more likely to be better nurtured.
He said some children were simply born 'not very bright,' and that politicians should allow them to follow practical educational courses rather than forcing conventional teaching on them. He said there can still be exceptional working-class students, however, such as writer DH Lawrence, who came from a humble background.
Referring to a paper by the novelist, who wrote about a boy named Jimmy who was not very bright, he asked: 'Why do we think that we can make him brighter than God made him?'.
Mr Woodhead, who once demanded that 15,000 incompetent teachers be sacked, argued that the Labour Government had betrayed children by denying that some weren't suited to formal education, and creating a system designed to make learning 'accessible' and 'personalised' rather than rigorous. 'I've taught, and I can still remember trying to interest children who had no interest whatsoever in English,' he said. 'They didn't want to be in the classroom. If I'm honest I didn't want them to be there either because they were disruptive to children who did want to learn.
'What was the point? If we had had a system whereby those young people were able to follow practical educational courses that gave them a sense of worth, a sense that they weren't dull and less intelligent than others, it would have been much better for them.'
Speaking to the Guardian, Mr Woodhead suggested giving all children a basic primary education, like reading, writing and maths, and then sending them to a selective secondary system. He recommends education vouchers so that schools that failed to perform would have to change or eventually close.
Mr Woodhead, who suffers from motor neurone disease but continues to chair Cognita, a company that runs independent schools, admits that this system would not be entirely fair. 'Life isn't fair,' he said. 'We're never going to make it fair.'
SOURCE
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
NHS spent 350m on management consultants
They could have hired a lot of doctors and nurses for that
The NHS paid 350 million to management consultants in England last year, according to figures released today. The Royal College of Nursing said that the spending - the equivalent of 330 fully staffed 28-bed medical wards, 9,160 experienced staff nurses or 267,647 bed days in an intensive babycare unit - was "utterly shocking".
About 273 million of the money was not related to patient care, said Peter Carter, the RCN chief executive, who obtained the figures through freedom of information legislation. The bulk of the money was spent on increasing competition in the health service and supporting bids for foundation status by NHS trusts, he added. "These figures are utterly shocking when you consider the difference that this money could have made to patients," Dr Carter said.
"A very significant sum of money is clearly being spent on setting up competition in the NHS and pursuing foundation status, rather than being invested in patient care. You only have to look at what happened at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust to see the consequences of this." A report earlier this year into up to 1,200 deaths in Mid Staffordshire criticised the trust board for being more interested in attaining foundation status than caring for patients.
The RCN believes that the total spent on management consultants in 2008/09 may be higher, as more than 40 per cent of the NHS organisations which it contacted did not provide details of their spending.
Reducing the amount spent on management consultants could deliver 11 per cent of the 2.3 billion savings demanded from the Department of Health in last month's Budget, Dr Carter said. "Before the Department of Health and local health trusts look at cutting frontline services, training budgets or new facilities, they need to look very carefully at the money spent on external advice and what value is added to the patient experience," he said.
"When some individual management consultants are getting more than 1,000 a day to advise on finance, we must surely be able to afford improvements to the quality of patient care. "Savings in this area could contribute a huge proportion of the savings to be made by the Department of Health, without jeopardising patient care."
According to the the RCN, 39 per cent of the money spent on management consultants was allocated to market testing designed to help providers and commissioners identify the most profitable options in the NHS market. Twenty-three per cent was used to support applications for foundation status, 13 per cent to achieve "provider separation", and 12 per cent to buy advice on the Private Finance Initiative.
The Department of Health said: "Individual NHS organisations decide how best to invest their resources to ensure local people get the best possible care and services. We expect organisations to consider value for money and patients' interests in all aspects of their expenditure. "All spending and investment is subject to independent audit - 350 million equates to less than half a per cent of total NHS expenditure for the last financial year."
SOURCE
The decline into anarchy of British schools
The need for police to be permanently stationed in British schools would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago
Police have been drafted in at almost a quarter of schools as part of an initiative to tackle classroom violence, gang membership and truancy, according to new figures. More than 5,000 state schools in England, including one in five primaries, have their own dedicated officer, it was disclosed. The Government said the number was around 10 times higher than previous estimates and insisted every school in the country could eventually get its own police officer. Labour claimed the drive improved child safety, cut expulsion rates and stopped pupils slipping into crime or joining gangs. Police also helped search pupils for weapons in some schools, ministers said.
Opposition MPs said it underlined the extent to which teachers were powerless to impose discipline. It is also feared the initiative drains limited police resources.
But Rod Jarman, Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, said: "Partnerships have helped to make the schools and the surrounding area safer places, evidenced through significant reductions in crime and antisocial behaviour and greater confidence of young people that police will deal with their issues. "Through these partnerships we are also better able tackle the causes of violent extremism and to deal with specific issues that are of concern to young people such as bullying, weapons, drugs, alcohol and gang culture."
The Safer Schools Partnership was introduced by David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary, in 2002. Under the plan, some police officers are permanently based on the school site and others patrol schools as part of their beat. Ministers said police were used to deter crime and anti-social behaviour in corridors and classrooms, stopping children playing truant and helping pupils "at risk of offending or susceptible to violent extremism or gang culture".
They are also intended to help boost relations between the police and young people and provide "specialist support" for searching pupils suspected of attempting to smuggle weapons past the school gates. Teachers themselves have already been given legal powers to search pupils' clothes, bags and lockers for knives, but research suggests many are reluctant to use them.
On Monday, updated guidance was due to be launched by the Government, Youth Justice Board and the Association of Chief Police Officers about how to set up partnerships.
A survey of police forces also showed more than 5,000 schools already have dedicated officers. Previous figures suggested the number was nearer 500. It was disclosed that 45 per cent of secondary schools and 20 per cent of primaries are now involved.
But Nick Gibb, the Conservative shadow schools minister, said it showed some schools were out of control. The Tories have accused Labour of undermining headteachers' right to expel badly behaved pupils by allowing parents to challenge rulings - leading to many excluded children being reinstated. "We have reached a sorry state when thousands of policemen are stationed in primary and secondary schools in this country," he said. "We need to give heads and teachers powers they need to install discipline and not resort to using up valuable police time."
Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said: "It's great news that over 5000 schools are already involved in Safer School Partnerships but I want every school to work with the police to keep young people safe and prevent problems with youth crime before they escalate." More than 5,000 state schools in England, including one in five primaries, have their own dedicated officer, it was disclosed.
SOURCE
Statins: life-saving wonder-drugs or just life-damaging?
Many readers empathised with Christopher Hudson when he wrote about his experience of taking statins. Here, he renews his call for doctors to take the concerns of patients more seriously
The phone calls began around breakfast time on March 12. Emails also started pouring in, to me, to our friends, to our friends' friends and to this newspaper, which, that morning, had published my story - "Wonder Drug That Stole My Memory" - about my experience of taking statins.
It seems to have struck a nerve. Over the next fortnight, scores of people up and down the country posted comments on telegraph.co.uk about their own experiences with the same drugs. Their symptoms included forgetfulness, confusion, loss of names and words, numbness in the fingertips. Reading about my predicament seemed to have synthesised a lot of fears and emotions, ranging from bitterness towards the medical profession, to relief that their symptoms might not premise Alzheimer's after all.
How many more people must there be who think they are alone in their suffering? Last week it was claimed that every third person in England over the age of 45 was taking statins - around seven million people. Worldwide, they are now the most commonly prescribed drug in the history of medicine. Yet, according to the Department of Health, up to 10 per cent of patients may have significant side-effects. That is to say, 700,000 Britons may now be suffering moderate to crippling pain or loss of memory or libido, after taking a drug that is hailed everywhere as the greatest pharmacological find of the 21st century.
Many of my respondents had suffered far worse experiences that anything that the doctors, the warnings on the packets or the promotional literature could have led them to expect. They claim their limbs felt like lead weights; they had lost the power of concentration, and in some cases their sex drive was affected. One man who had severe muscle pains was told by his doctor that tests in the US had revealed that statins could have the effect of "dissolving muscles".
It sounded like science fiction - but then I spoke to my cousin, a London GP, who rang me while recovering from hip surgery. He believes that his two hip replacements were both largely down to the statins he took, which weakened the musculature of his hips and thighs.
As for forgetfulness, there were writers who could not remember their own phone number. One post read heart-rendingly, "I am 62 and have been taking high-dosage statins for 20 years following a heart attack. My high cholesterol is genetic. I have insomnia, muscle pains and serious memory loss, short and long term. I can't even remember the events of my wedding day. My life is a closed book."
Why has the widespread evidence of such side-effects from statin intolerance been ignored by the medical profession for so long? The nonchalance with which some GPs appear to shrug off the problem is extraordinary. As another correspondent states, "If the substance was a sweet, a drink or a foodstuff, the Health and Safety Executive would get it banned immediately".
I believe there is a reluctance to investigate any statin-related problems properly. Too many people in the scientific and medical professions see them as drugs that can do no wrong. They are also cheap and effective, and according to the Department of Health, they save 10,000 lives a year, significantly reducing strokes and coronary heart disease. The latest evidence suggests that they may also cut the risk of deep-vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolisms.
It is no wonder, then, that having found this "wonder-drug" effective against some of the most common health problems in the industrialised world, scientists are not all that keen to criticise it. For one thing, it would be taking on the pharmaceutical giants that developed the drug; for another, as Telegraph columnist Dr James LeFanu pointed out recently, family doctors get a special payment from the Government for everyone they treat for a raised cholesterol level.
It is left up to each GP as to what constitutes a "raised" level, which may be why I came across so many "cholesterol victims" among my correspondents. I have had relatively high cholesterol for years, probably genetic, and I have always been told the same thing by GPs and Bupa doctors: 7.5 is too high, 6.5 is rather higher than it should be, and if you can bring it down to a level of 5.5 that would be just fine. Yet there are patients here being treated with statins for mildly high blood pressure when their cholesterol level was at 4.3 or lower. These pills are handed out like Smarties.
Despite the mounting evidence of problems, the medical profession seems alarmingly relaxed about the risks. The other day I happened upon a six-year-old transcript of a BBC radio phone-in show on statins. A cardiologist was present in the studio. Everything was going swimmingly until a lady from Powys said she was getting terrible muscle pain in her thighs after taking the drugs. "I couldn't lift my foot off the ground," she complained. "I couldn't get on and off the loo; let's face it, I couldn't even put my knickers on." The cardiologist tried to reassure her. "In less than one person in a thousand, quite literally, less than one person in a thousand, do statins cause a serious inflammation in the muscles," he said.
Today, the figure has risen to as many as one in 10. But just the other day, on a BBC ask-the-doctor website, a consultant was, to my mind, downplaying the side-effects. "Tummy upsets, aches, muscle aches and liver problems are among the common side effects of statins," she stated airily. "Most of these settle with time."
This is not good enough. Statin 'victims' deserve better. For one thing, they need more answers to crucial questions, such as what alternatives there might be to statin therapy - such as fibrates or diet, for example - and how successful they are. The British Heart Foundation says that tests can be done to identify those patients at greatest risk of side-effects; if so, why are they not widely utilised? The Department of Health refuses to commit itself on alternatives to statins, saying only that there is a range of cholesterol-lowering treatments that can be used in cases of statin intolerance, and patients should consult their doctors about which one is most appropriate.
Many of those who responded to my article recommended a range of alternatives. My favourite came from Father Ignatius Brown: "Red wine, dark chocolate, porridge, fresh air, long walks, small amounts of cheese made from unpasteurised milk, plenty of leafy greens, wild salmon, berries - and laughter".
For my part, I believe that I haven't fully shaken off the effects of my encounter with statins, and I don't know whether I will. What I do know is that there is a dark and growing underside to the "wonder drug" that needs to be exposed and more fully researched.
A doctor writes...
A year ago I wrote an article in the Telegraph advocating the greater use of statins. Therefore, I feel obliged to respond to Christopher Hudson's concerns. Statins were first developed in Japan in the late Seventies. Today they are taken by tens of millions of middle-aged and elderly people worldwide. In the last 20 years, the use of statins has increased exponentially. So what impact have they had at the frontline of the NHS, in the emergency rooms of our District General Hospitals?
In the last 10 years death rates from coronary heart disease (CHD) have fallen by 46 per cent in people under 65. The decrease in mortality is greatest in the over 55's, and is due to a reduction in the major risk factors such as smoking, improved treatment in the immediate aftermath of a heart attack (eg clot-busting drugs), and widespread secondary prevention, including statins.
The figures are conclusive: we are winning the battle for our arteries, and statins are one of our most powerful allies against heart attacks, strokes, and other vascular diseases. We have enormous amounts of data on statins now, confirming that they are safe to take [How can this guy utter such obvious lies??], and that their benefits far outweigh the well-documented risks.
All drugs have side-effects, and with every prescription he or she writes, a doctor is making a risk-benefit analysis. The most significant side-effect of statins is a reversible inflammation of muscle which is seen in less than 0.01 per cent of recipients. As with every drug, extreme side-effects are occasionally reported: in the case of statins there have been fatalities due to renal failure with an incidence of 0.15 cases per million prescriptions. Abnormalities in liver function are also recognised but rarely significant, and almost always reversible on cessation of medication.
Memory problems are a rare but serious side effect of statins. Patients who are concerned about this aspect of statin medication, should consult their GP and consider a "drug holiday". The vast majority of side-effects would be expected to resolve within the course of a month and if symptoms persisted then other causes should be considered. In those at risk from vascular disease, memory problems are common after middle-age and often a result of damage to small blood vessels in the brain by high blood pressure and atheroma. In this case, it would be an error to attribute a poor memory to a side-effect when, in the majority of cases, the drug is protecting against further damage to our brains.
Let us return to the statistics: CHD is the most common cause of death (and premature death) in Britain; 1 in 5 men and 1 in 6 women die from CHD, and it causes 101,000 deaths here annually. Each year, 130,000 people succumb to strokes, and it is the biggest single cause of serious disability in Britain. In my view, and that of most doctors, the risk-benefit analysis for statins is favourable.
SOURCE
What the ignoramus doctor above omits to mention is that there is much evidence to show that high cholesterol does NOT elevate the risk of heart disease. Statins cure an imaginary problem. Heart disease is a big problem but statins are not the answer. The cholesterol/heart disease connection is a tenacious theory, nothing more
Getting real about the urban heat island effect
A MUCH higher estimate here of the urban heat island effect than Warmists normally allow. Jones and Wang argued for just half a degree and it is their work that dominated the IPCC conclusions
LONDON and other cities could see summer temperatures rise to more than 10C above those in the surrounding countryside, according to Met Office research being used to help devise the first official climate change map of Britain. Scientists have been studying a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, in which cities become significantly hotter than the areas around them because of the heat they generate themselves.
Big cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow already reach temperatures 2C - 3C above their surroundings in the summer. Scientists fear that difference could grow four to fivefold as hotter weather combines with soaring energy use and population growth, making such temperature gaps more frequent and more extreme.
The research is linked to a wider project aimed at helping scientists predict the impact rising temperatures will have on different parts of the country. The full results will be released next month by Hilary Benn, the environment secretary.
Vicky Pope, the head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: "As the climate gets warmer, sweltering summer temperatures will combine with rising energy use, the heat-retaining properties of buildings, and the sheer volume of people, to push temperatures higher and higher. "It may sometimes make life in the metropolis intolerable. Imagine the scorching conditions that commuters will face on London's Tube network."
The warning follows the disclosure by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global temperatures have risen by almost 1C since preindustrial times. The panel predicts global temperatures will have risen by 2C by 2050 with total warming of up to 5-6C possible by 2100.
Such findings are now widely accepted but questions remain, especially regarding the impact on cities, where more than half the world's population live. New York - hotter in summer than British cities - is regularly 7C-8C hotter than nearby rural areas.
In Britain, 90% of the population lives in urban or suburban areas so the impact on people is potentially huge. The research is based partly on data from heatwaves, such as the one in 2003, and on computer projections. It also looked at cities such as Athens and Beirut which suffer from the urban heat phenomenon. The August 2003 heatwave saw England's daytime temperatures top 30C for 10 days and exceed 35C in many places. The same heatwave saw temperatures in the upper 30Cs in the centres of cities such as London, Birmingham and Manchester. This was often 6C-7C above those in rural areas.
Researchers fear central city temperatures may exceed 40C as the century progresses. "The high temperatures of 2003 were extraordinary but may become common by 2050 and even be seen as relatively cool by 2100," said Pope.
One of the factors that made London so hot was its inability to cool down. At night during the heatwave, the city centre was sometimes 9C warmer than its surrounding green belt. This is because rural and suburban areas lose heat at night but in cities the materials used for hard surfaces store more solar energy and lose it more slowly. This effect is amplified by the heat from lights, electrical equipment and cars. Also, as cities get warmer, they consume more power trying to stay cool, because of air-condition-ers and fridges working harder.
Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the Met Office, who oversaw the research, said Tokyo showed what British cities might face. Its tall, densely packed buildings and high energy use mean the Japanese capital is often 10C hotter than the surrounding countryside. [Yet Tokyo is thriving! How odd!!] "We must change how we plan cities, to maximise green spaces and create structures that dissipate heat," said Betts.
Urban heat islands have a serious impact on health. In 2003 there were 2,091 more deaths than normal between August 4 and 13 in Britain, most of them among elderly people in southeast England. For people aged over 75 there was a 33% increase in mortality.
SOURCE
The new morality: You can say what you like but nobody must be upset
Particularly if they can afford to sue:
I never thought I would agree with Perez Hilton on anything but I do on this
The fruit of Leftist moral relativism: "A "decade of yobbery" under Labour has seen the number of persistent young offenders plaguing Britain's streets increase by 60 per cent while the number of crimes they commit has almost doubled. In one police force they account for one in seven offences brought to justice while another saw the number of problem offenders more than treble. A persistent young offender is anyone aged 10 to 17 who is guilty of at least one offence on four or more separate occasions within a set number of years. The figures show the problem is growing suggesting a new generation of serial criminals committing more and more crime. David Ruffley, the Conservative police reform minister, said: "These new figures show that Labour Ministers have presided over a decade of yobbery, fuelled by massive increases in the number of repeat young offenders. "These figures make a mockery of Labour's promises to tackle youth crime. There have been 46 Labour strategies since 1997 to try and tackle youth crime and it's now clear they have failed."
British Labour party response to fraud revelations? A coverup: "A Labour plot to suppress the future release of MPs' expenses has been uncovered by The Times. As the frenzy over MPs' claims continues into a fourth day, senior figures from all parties will meet this morning to discuss how to salvage Parliament's battered reputation and it emerged that the tax authorities are expected to investigate whether MPs have breached the law. Plans to bring in a private-sector company to run the expenses department have raised fears, however, that the move is being used as a smokescreen to suppress future embarrassing revelations."
They could have hired a lot of doctors and nurses for that
The NHS paid 350 million to management consultants in England last year, according to figures released today. The Royal College of Nursing said that the spending - the equivalent of 330 fully staffed 28-bed medical wards, 9,160 experienced staff nurses or 267,647 bed days in an intensive babycare unit - was "utterly shocking".
About 273 million of the money was not related to patient care, said Peter Carter, the RCN chief executive, who obtained the figures through freedom of information legislation. The bulk of the money was spent on increasing competition in the health service and supporting bids for foundation status by NHS trusts, he added. "These figures are utterly shocking when you consider the difference that this money could have made to patients," Dr Carter said.
"A very significant sum of money is clearly being spent on setting up competition in the NHS and pursuing foundation status, rather than being invested in patient care. You only have to look at what happened at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust to see the consequences of this." A report earlier this year into up to 1,200 deaths in Mid Staffordshire criticised the trust board for being more interested in attaining foundation status than caring for patients.
The RCN believes that the total spent on management consultants in 2008/09 may be higher, as more than 40 per cent of the NHS organisations which it contacted did not provide details of their spending.
Reducing the amount spent on management consultants could deliver 11 per cent of the 2.3 billion savings demanded from the Department of Health in last month's Budget, Dr Carter said. "Before the Department of Health and local health trusts look at cutting frontline services, training budgets or new facilities, they need to look very carefully at the money spent on external advice and what value is added to the patient experience," he said.
"When some individual management consultants are getting more than 1,000 a day to advise on finance, we must surely be able to afford improvements to the quality of patient care. "Savings in this area could contribute a huge proportion of the savings to be made by the Department of Health, without jeopardising patient care."
According to the the RCN, 39 per cent of the money spent on management consultants was allocated to market testing designed to help providers and commissioners identify the most profitable options in the NHS market. Twenty-three per cent was used to support applications for foundation status, 13 per cent to achieve "provider separation", and 12 per cent to buy advice on the Private Finance Initiative.
The Department of Health said: "Individual NHS organisations decide how best to invest their resources to ensure local people get the best possible care and services. We expect organisations to consider value for money and patients' interests in all aspects of their expenditure. "All spending and investment is subject to independent audit - 350 million equates to less than half a per cent of total NHS expenditure for the last financial year."
SOURCE
The decline into anarchy of British schools
The need for police to be permanently stationed in British schools would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago
Police have been drafted in at almost a quarter of schools as part of an initiative to tackle classroom violence, gang membership and truancy, according to new figures. More than 5,000 state schools in England, including one in five primaries, have their own dedicated officer, it was disclosed. The Government said the number was around 10 times higher than previous estimates and insisted every school in the country could eventually get its own police officer. Labour claimed the drive improved child safety, cut expulsion rates and stopped pupils slipping into crime or joining gangs. Police also helped search pupils for weapons in some schools, ministers said.
Opposition MPs said it underlined the extent to which teachers were powerless to impose discipline. It is also feared the initiative drains limited police resources.
But Rod Jarman, Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, said: "Partnerships have helped to make the schools and the surrounding area safer places, evidenced through significant reductions in crime and antisocial behaviour and greater confidence of young people that police will deal with their issues. "Through these partnerships we are also better able tackle the causes of violent extremism and to deal with specific issues that are of concern to young people such as bullying, weapons, drugs, alcohol and gang culture."
The Safer Schools Partnership was introduced by David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary, in 2002. Under the plan, some police officers are permanently based on the school site and others patrol schools as part of their beat. Ministers said police were used to deter crime and anti-social behaviour in corridors and classrooms, stopping children playing truant and helping pupils "at risk of offending or susceptible to violent extremism or gang culture".
They are also intended to help boost relations between the police and young people and provide "specialist support" for searching pupils suspected of attempting to smuggle weapons past the school gates. Teachers themselves have already been given legal powers to search pupils' clothes, bags and lockers for knives, but research suggests many are reluctant to use them.
On Monday, updated guidance was due to be launched by the Government, Youth Justice Board and the Association of Chief Police Officers about how to set up partnerships.
A survey of police forces also showed more than 5,000 schools already have dedicated officers. Previous figures suggested the number was nearer 500. It was disclosed that 45 per cent of secondary schools and 20 per cent of primaries are now involved.
But Nick Gibb, the Conservative shadow schools minister, said it showed some schools were out of control. The Tories have accused Labour of undermining headteachers' right to expel badly behaved pupils by allowing parents to challenge rulings - leading to many excluded children being reinstated. "We have reached a sorry state when thousands of policemen are stationed in primary and secondary schools in this country," he said. "We need to give heads and teachers powers they need to install discipline and not resort to using up valuable police time."
Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said: "It's great news that over 5000 schools are already involved in Safer School Partnerships but I want every school to work with the police to keep young people safe and prevent problems with youth crime before they escalate." More than 5,000 state schools in England, including one in five primaries, have their own dedicated officer, it was disclosed.
SOURCE
Statins: life-saving wonder-drugs or just life-damaging?
Many readers empathised with Christopher Hudson when he wrote about his experience of taking statins. Here, he renews his call for doctors to take the concerns of patients more seriously
The phone calls began around breakfast time on March 12. Emails also started pouring in, to me, to our friends, to our friends' friends and to this newspaper, which, that morning, had published my story - "Wonder Drug That Stole My Memory" - about my experience of taking statins.
It seems to have struck a nerve. Over the next fortnight, scores of people up and down the country posted comments on telegraph.co.uk about their own experiences with the same drugs. Their symptoms included forgetfulness, confusion, loss of names and words, numbness in the fingertips. Reading about my predicament seemed to have synthesised a lot of fears and emotions, ranging from bitterness towards the medical profession, to relief that their symptoms might not premise Alzheimer's after all.
How many more people must there be who think they are alone in their suffering? Last week it was claimed that every third person in England over the age of 45 was taking statins - around seven million people. Worldwide, they are now the most commonly prescribed drug in the history of medicine. Yet, according to the Department of Health, up to 10 per cent of patients may have significant side-effects. That is to say, 700,000 Britons may now be suffering moderate to crippling pain or loss of memory or libido, after taking a drug that is hailed everywhere as the greatest pharmacological find of the 21st century.
Many of my respondents had suffered far worse experiences that anything that the doctors, the warnings on the packets or the promotional literature could have led them to expect. They claim their limbs felt like lead weights; they had lost the power of concentration, and in some cases their sex drive was affected. One man who had severe muscle pains was told by his doctor that tests in the US had revealed that statins could have the effect of "dissolving muscles".
It sounded like science fiction - but then I spoke to my cousin, a London GP, who rang me while recovering from hip surgery. He believes that his two hip replacements were both largely down to the statins he took, which weakened the musculature of his hips and thighs.
As for forgetfulness, there were writers who could not remember their own phone number. One post read heart-rendingly, "I am 62 and have been taking high-dosage statins for 20 years following a heart attack. My high cholesterol is genetic. I have insomnia, muscle pains and serious memory loss, short and long term. I can't even remember the events of my wedding day. My life is a closed book."
Why has the widespread evidence of such side-effects from statin intolerance been ignored by the medical profession for so long? The nonchalance with which some GPs appear to shrug off the problem is extraordinary. As another correspondent states, "If the substance was a sweet, a drink or a foodstuff, the Health and Safety Executive would get it banned immediately".
I believe there is a reluctance to investigate any statin-related problems properly. Too many people in the scientific and medical professions see them as drugs that can do no wrong. They are also cheap and effective, and according to the Department of Health, they save 10,000 lives a year, significantly reducing strokes and coronary heart disease. The latest evidence suggests that they may also cut the risk of deep-vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolisms.
It is no wonder, then, that having found this "wonder-drug" effective against some of the most common health problems in the industrialised world, scientists are not all that keen to criticise it. For one thing, it would be taking on the pharmaceutical giants that developed the drug; for another, as Telegraph columnist Dr James LeFanu pointed out recently, family doctors get a special payment from the Government for everyone they treat for a raised cholesterol level.
It is left up to each GP as to what constitutes a "raised" level, which may be why I came across so many "cholesterol victims" among my correspondents. I have had relatively high cholesterol for years, probably genetic, and I have always been told the same thing by GPs and Bupa doctors: 7.5 is too high, 6.5 is rather higher than it should be, and if you can bring it down to a level of 5.5 that would be just fine. Yet there are patients here being treated with statins for mildly high blood pressure when their cholesterol level was at 4.3 or lower. These pills are handed out like Smarties.
Despite the mounting evidence of problems, the medical profession seems alarmingly relaxed about the risks. The other day I happened upon a six-year-old transcript of a BBC radio phone-in show on statins. A cardiologist was present in the studio. Everything was going swimmingly until a lady from Powys said she was getting terrible muscle pain in her thighs after taking the drugs. "I couldn't lift my foot off the ground," she complained. "I couldn't get on and off the loo; let's face it, I couldn't even put my knickers on." The cardiologist tried to reassure her. "In less than one person in a thousand, quite literally, less than one person in a thousand, do statins cause a serious inflammation in the muscles," he said.
Today, the figure has risen to as many as one in 10. But just the other day, on a BBC ask-the-doctor website, a consultant was, to my mind, downplaying the side-effects. "Tummy upsets, aches, muscle aches and liver problems are among the common side effects of statins," she stated airily. "Most of these settle with time."
This is not good enough. Statin 'victims' deserve better. For one thing, they need more answers to crucial questions, such as what alternatives there might be to statin therapy - such as fibrates or diet, for example - and how successful they are. The British Heart Foundation says that tests can be done to identify those patients at greatest risk of side-effects; if so, why are they not widely utilised? The Department of Health refuses to commit itself on alternatives to statins, saying only that there is a range of cholesterol-lowering treatments that can be used in cases of statin intolerance, and patients should consult their doctors about which one is most appropriate.
Many of those who responded to my article recommended a range of alternatives. My favourite came from Father Ignatius Brown: "Red wine, dark chocolate, porridge, fresh air, long walks, small amounts of cheese made from unpasteurised milk, plenty of leafy greens, wild salmon, berries - and laughter".
For my part, I believe that I haven't fully shaken off the effects of my encounter with statins, and I don't know whether I will. What I do know is that there is a dark and growing underside to the "wonder drug" that needs to be exposed and more fully researched.
A doctor writes...
A year ago I wrote an article in the Telegraph advocating the greater use of statins. Therefore, I feel obliged to respond to Christopher Hudson's concerns. Statins were first developed in Japan in the late Seventies. Today they are taken by tens of millions of middle-aged and elderly people worldwide. In the last 20 years, the use of statins has increased exponentially. So what impact have they had at the frontline of the NHS, in the emergency rooms of our District General Hospitals?
In the last 10 years death rates from coronary heart disease (CHD) have fallen by 46 per cent in people under 65. The decrease in mortality is greatest in the over 55's, and is due to a reduction in the major risk factors such as smoking, improved treatment in the immediate aftermath of a heart attack (eg clot-busting drugs), and widespread secondary prevention, including statins.
The figures are conclusive: we are winning the battle for our arteries, and statins are one of our most powerful allies against heart attacks, strokes, and other vascular diseases. We have enormous amounts of data on statins now, confirming that they are safe to take [How can this guy utter such obvious lies??], and that their benefits far outweigh the well-documented risks.
All drugs have side-effects, and with every prescription he or she writes, a doctor is making a risk-benefit analysis. The most significant side-effect of statins is a reversible inflammation of muscle which is seen in less than 0.01 per cent of recipients. As with every drug, extreme side-effects are occasionally reported: in the case of statins there have been fatalities due to renal failure with an incidence of 0.15 cases per million prescriptions. Abnormalities in liver function are also recognised but rarely significant, and almost always reversible on cessation of medication.
Memory problems are a rare but serious side effect of statins. Patients who are concerned about this aspect of statin medication, should consult their GP and consider a "drug holiday". The vast majority of side-effects would be expected to resolve within the course of a month and if symptoms persisted then other causes should be considered. In those at risk from vascular disease, memory problems are common after middle-age and often a result of damage to small blood vessels in the brain by high blood pressure and atheroma. In this case, it would be an error to attribute a poor memory to a side-effect when, in the majority of cases, the drug is protecting against further damage to our brains.
Let us return to the statistics: CHD is the most common cause of death (and premature death) in Britain; 1 in 5 men and 1 in 6 women die from CHD, and it causes 101,000 deaths here annually. Each year, 130,000 people succumb to strokes, and it is the biggest single cause of serious disability in Britain. In my view, and that of most doctors, the risk-benefit analysis for statins is favourable.
SOURCE
What the ignoramus doctor above omits to mention is that there is much evidence to show that high cholesterol does NOT elevate the risk of heart disease. Statins cure an imaginary problem. Heart disease is a big problem but statins are not the answer. The cholesterol/heart disease connection is a tenacious theory, nothing more
Getting real about the urban heat island effect
A MUCH higher estimate here of the urban heat island effect than Warmists normally allow. Jones and Wang argued for just half a degree and it is their work that dominated the IPCC conclusions
LONDON and other cities could see summer temperatures rise to more than 10C above those in the surrounding countryside, according to Met Office research being used to help devise the first official climate change map of Britain. Scientists have been studying a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, in which cities become significantly hotter than the areas around them because of the heat they generate themselves.
Big cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow already reach temperatures 2C - 3C above their surroundings in the summer. Scientists fear that difference could grow four to fivefold as hotter weather combines with soaring energy use and population growth, making such temperature gaps more frequent and more extreme.
The research is linked to a wider project aimed at helping scientists predict the impact rising temperatures will have on different parts of the country. The full results will be released next month by Hilary Benn, the environment secretary.
Vicky Pope, the head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: "As the climate gets warmer, sweltering summer temperatures will combine with rising energy use, the heat-retaining properties of buildings, and the sheer volume of people, to push temperatures higher and higher. "It may sometimes make life in the metropolis intolerable. Imagine the scorching conditions that commuters will face on London's Tube network."
The warning follows the disclosure by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global temperatures have risen by almost 1C since preindustrial times. The panel predicts global temperatures will have risen by 2C by 2050 with total warming of up to 5-6C possible by 2100.
Such findings are now widely accepted but questions remain, especially regarding the impact on cities, where more than half the world's population live. New York - hotter in summer than British cities - is regularly 7C-8C hotter than nearby rural areas.
In Britain, 90% of the population lives in urban or suburban areas so the impact on people is potentially huge. The research is based partly on data from heatwaves, such as the one in 2003, and on computer projections. It also looked at cities such as Athens and Beirut which suffer from the urban heat phenomenon. The August 2003 heatwave saw England's daytime temperatures top 30C for 10 days and exceed 35C in many places. The same heatwave saw temperatures in the upper 30Cs in the centres of cities such as London, Birmingham and Manchester. This was often 6C-7C above those in rural areas.
Researchers fear central city temperatures may exceed 40C as the century progresses. "The high temperatures of 2003 were extraordinary but may become common by 2050 and even be seen as relatively cool by 2100," said Pope.
One of the factors that made London so hot was its inability to cool down. At night during the heatwave, the city centre was sometimes 9C warmer than its surrounding green belt. This is because rural and suburban areas lose heat at night but in cities the materials used for hard surfaces store more solar energy and lose it more slowly. This effect is amplified by the heat from lights, electrical equipment and cars. Also, as cities get warmer, they consume more power trying to stay cool, because of air-condition-ers and fridges working harder.
Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the Met Office, who oversaw the research, said Tokyo showed what British cities might face. Its tall, densely packed buildings and high energy use mean the Japanese capital is often 10C hotter than the surrounding countryside. [Yet Tokyo is thriving! How odd!!] "We must change how we plan cities, to maximise green spaces and create structures that dissipate heat," said Betts.
Urban heat islands have a serious impact on health. In 2003 there were 2,091 more deaths than normal between August 4 and 13 in Britain, most of them among elderly people in southeast England. For people aged over 75 there was a 33% increase in mortality.
SOURCE
The new morality: You can say what you like but nobody must be upset
Particularly if they can afford to sue:
"Oscar-winning British actress Kate Winslet is suing a UK tabloid newspaper for the "unpleasant and nasty way" in which it reported about her fitness regime. Winslet, 33, claims that the Daily Mail article "injured her personal and professional reputation". She is suing the paper for libel damages of 150,000 pounds ($298,240).
In the feature article, headlined Should Kate Winslet win an Oscar for the world's most irritating actress?, it was claimed that the star had underplayed the amount of exercise she needed to stay in shape. It disputed a quote given to Elle magazine, in which Winslet said: "I don't go to the gym because I don't have time, but I do Pilates workout DVDs for 20 minutes or more every day at home."
According to the court papers, Winslet said she was particularly upset by the "very unpleasant and nasty way" in which the article was written."
Source
I never thought I would agree with Perez Hilton on anything but I do on this
The fruit of Leftist moral relativism: "A "decade of yobbery" under Labour has seen the number of persistent young offenders plaguing Britain's streets increase by 60 per cent while the number of crimes they commit has almost doubled. In one police force they account for one in seven offences brought to justice while another saw the number of problem offenders more than treble. A persistent young offender is anyone aged 10 to 17 who is guilty of at least one offence on four or more separate occasions within a set number of years. The figures show the problem is growing suggesting a new generation of serial criminals committing more and more crime. David Ruffley, the Conservative police reform minister, said: "These new figures show that Labour Ministers have presided over a decade of yobbery, fuelled by massive increases in the number of repeat young offenders. "These figures make a mockery of Labour's promises to tackle youth crime. There have been 46 Labour strategies since 1997 to try and tackle youth crime and it's now clear they have failed."
British Labour party response to fraud revelations? A coverup: "A Labour plot to suppress the future release of MPs' expenses has been uncovered by The Times. As the frenzy over MPs' claims continues into a fourth day, senior figures from all parties will meet this morning to discuss how to salvage Parliament's battered reputation and it emerged that the tax authorities are expected to investigate whether MPs have breached the law. Plans to bring in a private-sector company to run the expenses department have raised fears, however, that the move is being used as a smokescreen to suppress future embarrassing revelations."
Monday, May 11, 2009
Scotland: Homosexual rights campaigner who led double life as boss of paedophile ring among 8 guilty of catalogue of child abuse
Eight members of a paedophile ring were found guilty today of a catalogue of child pornography and abuse charges, including the sexual assault of a three-month old baby. The ringleaders - convicted sex offender Neil Strachan and gay rights campaigner James Rennie - were convicted of sex attacks on children. Strachan, 41, and Rennie, 38, both from Edinburgh, were also found guilty of conspiring to abuse youngsters, as were three other members of the gang.
All eight accused in the 10-week trial at the High Court in Edinburgh were convicted of a series of child porn offences. The gang members were traced through their explicit internet chats about sexual fantasies involving children. From various locations across Scotland, they plotted, whether by using web cameras or other means such as by phone, to participate in sexual offences, including rape and sodomy.
The jury - down to 14 men and women after one member was discharged during the trial - took 10 hours over two days to reach its verdicts. The court fell silent as the succession of verdicts to more than 50 charges were given. Nearly 125,000 indecent images were seized during Operation Algebra, which uncovered the group, believed to be Scotland's biggest paedophile network.
Ross Webber, 27, of North Berwick, Craig Boath, 24, from Dundee and John Milligan, 40, from Glasgow, were all found guilty of conspiring to participate in the sexual abuse of children along with Strachan and Rennie. The five men, with Colin Slaven, 23, from Edinburgh and Neil Campbell, 46 and John Murphy, 44, from Glasgow, were also convicted of a catalogue of child porn offences.
But the undisputed ringleaders of the ring were Strachan and Rennie, who on the surface held down good jobs and were trusted members of the community. But the pair had a shared interest in young boys and had collected some of the worst child abuse images ever seen by police experts. They were also responsible for the abuse of very young children - one as young as three months old.
Rennie was the successful chief executive of LGBT Youth Scotland, an organisation dedicated to helping young gay people. A former secondary school teacher, he regularly spoke out in public on gay issues, particularly how they affected young people. But the High Court in Edinburgh heard he was 'polluted by deviant compulsion'. Crown QC Dorothy Bain said: 'In reality he is someone who allowed his profound interest in the sexual abuse of children to engulf his entire life.'
The extent of his obsession with under-age sex unfolded as the 10-week trial progressed. He was charged and ultimately convicted of molesting a child over a number of years, starting at the age of three months. And in an online conversation with another accused, he even expressed a wish to see children with Down's Syndrome or a learning disability sexually abused.
Operation Algebra officers found that Rennie had links with paedophiles in the US and the Netherlands. He was traced and arrested by police at the end of 2007. He was suspended from his high-profile post and by February 2008 had resigned.
Strachan also hid a dark past, in which he was jailed for three years for molesting a young boy. He was the man who sparked Operation Algebra when indecent images were found on computer equipment used by him in his work. Tests revealed 'sinister' emails between him and Rennie. They had encountered each other online in 2004 when Strachan congratulated Rennie on the content of his web page on a site known to have been misused by paedophiles.
When the case came to trial, what the jury did not know was that Strachan had offended before. He was jailed for three years in 1997 for repeatedly molesting a young boy while he was an official at a youth football club. He started abusing the child when he was five years old and the abuse went on for two years. Strachan quit his post as secretary of Celtic East Boys Club in Edinburgh after he was caught.
When he was jailed, it emerged that he had also been convicted of a similar sex offence 12 years previously. Among the charges faced by Strachan in the current trial was an allegation that he committed a serious sexual offence against a toddler at New Year from 2005 into 2006.
But Strachan, despite being one of the worst offenders in the group, was the only one of the eight men on trial who denied every charge against him. Prosecutors were forced to piece together the case against him bit by bit. Crucial to their case was a photograph partially showing a man sexually assaulting a young child. The Crown called on a world-renowned expert in human anatomy to examine the picture, known in court as The Hogmanay Image.
Pinpointing the abuser's physical traits, including a distinctive thumbnail, Professor Susan Black said there was 'strong evidence' that Strachan and the man in the picture were the same person.
SOURCE
Once more, reality intrudes on a Greenie dream
It was meant to be a carbon-neutral adventure to fire the imaginations of 25,000 schoolchildren.
Raoul Surcouf, 40, a landscape gardener from Jersey, and Richard Spink, 32, a physiotherapist from Bristol, shunned the polluting aircraft normally used to reach Greenland's polar ice cap and set sail in Fleur, a 40ft yacht fitted with solar panels and a wind turbine. Schools were poised to follow their green expedition online; once the duo had skied across the Arctic wastes they had hoped to boast of the first carbon-neutral crossing of Greenland.
On Friday, nature, displaying a heavy irony, intervened. After a battering by hurricane force winds, the crew of the Carbon Neutral Expeditions craft had to be rescued 400 miles off Ireland.
As if their ordeal wasn't terrifying enough, their saviour seemed chosen to rub salt in their wounds: a 113,000-ton tanker, Overseas Yellowstone, carrying 680,000 barrels of crude. In a statement from the tanker, Spink said: "We experienced some of the harshest conditions known, with winds gusting hurricane force 12 ... The decision was made that the risk to our personal safety was too great to continue."
In truth, the crew could not afford to be choosy. They were in a life-threatening predicament, and heaped thanks on Captain Ferro, the tanker's skipper, and his crew for being "outstanding in the execution of the rescue". But the rather awkward twist was not lost on Spink, who ruefully noted afterwards that "the team are now safely and ironically aboard the oil tanker" as they headed to Maine, where they are due to arrive in three days.
SOURCE
'Give unruly kids a right royal rollicking' (whatever that is) says British nut
School behaviour tsar spells out his solution to Britain's unruly classrooms: don't suspend pupils, just send them to the head. Talk without the cane to back it up is unlikely to achieve anything, though
A good old-fashioned bawling out in the head's office can be a better way of dealing with badly behaved pupils than suspending them, the Government's behaviour "tsar" says today. Sir Alan Steer, a former headteacher, warns that schools that frequently suspend pupils for two or three weeks at a time should review their policies because they are failing to tackle poor behaviour.
"Sending them to the head and giving them a right royal rollicking could be better than giving them a fixed-term exclusion," he said in an interview with The Independent. "Some schools seem to have very high levels of fixed-term exclusions," he said ."I don't see that as showing you're tough on discipline. It could be absolutely the opposite. It is not being very effective and you might need to rethink your strategy if a pupil is excluded again and again. They just get used to being out of school."
Sir Alan, a former head of Seven Kings school in Ilford, Essex, who is coming to the end of his four-year tenure, was speaking for the first time since his "swansong" report on discipline last month. His comments also come on the day a new report shows that bright pupils in disadvantaged schools are missing out on GCSE grades because of the anti-learning culture of other children in the school.
The report, by the education charity the Sutton Trust, revealed talented pupils in the most disadvantaged schools underperform compared to pupils from the suburbs by half a grade per GCSE.
Sir Alan also discussed his plan to enshrine in law the teacher's right to impose discipline - making measures such as detention and confiscating mobile phones legal. He considers the new powers necessary because too many parents challenge school discipline rather than support it. As a result, some schools are reluctant to use traditional methods of discipline.
Sir Alan also warned that schools are flouting a new law under which children expelled or suspended are entitled to a full-time education after six days out of the classroom. By not sticking to the rules, excluded pupils are left to roam the streets and are falling prey to gang influences. "They're not likely to go to libraries," he added.
Figures show that, while the overall number of permanent exclusions has fallen to around 8,680 a year, the number of suspensions has risen. In particular, according to figures released by the Conservatives, the number of children excluded more than 10 times in a year has tripled in four years.
Michael Gove, the shadow Education Secretary, says that headteachers should have more freedom to exclude pupils permanently by abandoning the right to appeal against exclusion, but Sir Alan said he believed Mr Gove's case to be "misleading". "It is said that 25 per cent of pupils successfully appeal," he said. "Well, there are 8,680 permanent exclusions - 970 of which went to appeal. Of these 250 were successful but only 100 of them ended with the pupil being reinstated. You can see where they got the 25 per cent figure from, just about, but the number reinstated was about 1.2 per cent of the total."
Sir Alan also wants new powers allowing teachers to search pupils for weapons, drugs and alcohol to be reviewed in three years' time to see whether they are effective. He said: "If you're faced with a 6ft 6in teenager you suspect of having a machete, I would be the first to say it's a case for bringing in the boys in blue rather than searching for it yourself."
Sir Alan, who caused controversy when he launched his latest report at the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers' conference with a declaration that "there is no behaviour crisis in schools", stuck to his guns. "I really strongly believe we don't have a crisis in our schools," he said. "We have problems and we have to tackle them but there have always been problems. Most kids are great. Why don't we think more of the 150,000 kids who are sole carers for their family - or the tens of thousands who spend hours and hours volunteering in the community? We have a tendency to be constantly negative about children."
SOURCE
Students at top British university revolt over teaching standards
A PRESTIGIOUS university has been hit by Britain's first tuition fee rebellion from hundreds of students angry at reduced teaching hours and attempts to have essays marked by undergraduates instead of lecturers. Some 600 students reading economics and finance at Bristol have signed a complaint arguing that the university has failed to improve its teaching since tuition fees were raised to more than 3,000 in 2006. Instead, they claim standards have deteriorated. In a seven-page complaint to the university they write: "Since 2006 the university has charged more and delivered less. We demand results today."
The rebellion may be copied by students at other universities as the number studying for degrees increases while funding to teach them is squeezed. It will make it harder for universities to justify a further increase in fees in a review this summer by John Denham, the universities secretary.
Eric Thomas, Bristol's vice-chancellor, has argued that the 3,145 limit on tuition fees is too low, although he acknowledges the recession has ruled out an early increase.
The protests at Bristol have been led by Robert Denham, a former grammar school pupil from Croydon, south London, and Roderick McKinley, who attended the independent Westminster school. "Bristol gives a good education, but it is not good enough," said Denham (who is not related to John Denham). "There had been a lot of general moaning but the spark was a decision to cut the length of exams from three hours to two."
One academic at Bristol, who declined to be named, said: "It has created a sensation at the university. This is the most important student rebellion in this country in a generation. They should be proud."
The complaint by Denham, McKinley and fellow students analyses the university's finances and points out how it has benefited from increased income. "Revenue per student from tuition fees has increased and we simply ask that the quality of our education be improved accordingly," it says, before listing grievances, all of which it claims have been sparked by the university's cost-cutting:
- Some student essays are already being marked by fellow undergraduates, instead of academics, in a trial that could see strugglers giving marks to high-flyers.
- The prospectus suggested lectures would be given to groups of about 100 students. In reality, they contain up to 380, although 150-200 is more typical.
- Tutorials for small groups have been withdrawn for many students. Some of the rest contain up to 30 undergraduates. "The [department] should be providing more contact with academics, not less," the complaint states.
- Money from tuition fees is being diverted to other parts of the university rather than improving education for undergraduates.
David Willetts, the Tories' shadow universities secretary, who has helped broker negotiations at Bristol, said: "The students have done a very impressive and thorough analysis of the education they are entitled to expect for paying their fees. This will be a powerful trend that universities ignore at their peril." He added: "The only way universities could ever win an argument for higher fees is to show this would benefit the students and parents paying the fees. They have to wise up."
The dispute at Bristol - which the complaint acknowledges still offers a "top-class education" - shows even the most prestigious universities are under severe pressure from Labour's mass expansion of higher education. Universities say that they may have to make thousands of redundancies to achieve 180m efficiency savings by 2011. Academics are being balloted by the University and College Union on action in support of a 6% pay claim.
The previous hike in fees sparked one of the most serious backbench rebellions of Tony Blair's premiership.
Bristol, which celebrates its centenary this year, is still negotiating with students over their complaints. A spokesman said several of the changes described by the undergraduates as a decline in quality had been carried out only after consulting them - for example, changes to class size and to exam time. He said that students were not receiving less teaching time than those studying economics and finance at rival universities.
Bristol has described as "not true" the idea that increased tuition fees were intended to lead directly to improved teaching. Instead, it says they are aimed at strengthening the finances of universities.
Bristol University came 16th in the latest Sunday Times University Guide rankings, and would have been higher but for poor student scores. It was ranked sixth by head teachers and ninth by academics, but data from the National Student Survey showed undergraduates were less positive, putting it 109th, with just 11 institutions below it.
SOURCE
Eight members of a paedophile ring were found guilty today of a catalogue of child pornography and abuse charges, including the sexual assault of a three-month old baby. The ringleaders - convicted sex offender Neil Strachan and gay rights campaigner James Rennie - were convicted of sex attacks on children. Strachan, 41, and Rennie, 38, both from Edinburgh, were also found guilty of conspiring to abuse youngsters, as were three other members of the gang.
All eight accused in the 10-week trial at the High Court in Edinburgh were convicted of a series of child porn offences. The gang members were traced through their explicit internet chats about sexual fantasies involving children. From various locations across Scotland, they plotted, whether by using web cameras or other means such as by phone, to participate in sexual offences, including rape and sodomy.
The jury - down to 14 men and women after one member was discharged during the trial - took 10 hours over two days to reach its verdicts. The court fell silent as the succession of verdicts to more than 50 charges were given. Nearly 125,000 indecent images were seized during Operation Algebra, which uncovered the group, believed to be Scotland's biggest paedophile network.
Ross Webber, 27, of North Berwick, Craig Boath, 24, from Dundee and John Milligan, 40, from Glasgow, were all found guilty of conspiring to participate in the sexual abuse of children along with Strachan and Rennie. The five men, with Colin Slaven, 23, from Edinburgh and Neil Campbell, 46 and John Murphy, 44, from Glasgow, were also convicted of a catalogue of child porn offences.
But the undisputed ringleaders of the ring were Strachan and Rennie, who on the surface held down good jobs and were trusted members of the community. But the pair had a shared interest in young boys and had collected some of the worst child abuse images ever seen by police experts. They were also responsible for the abuse of very young children - one as young as three months old.
Rennie was the successful chief executive of LGBT Youth Scotland, an organisation dedicated to helping young gay people. A former secondary school teacher, he regularly spoke out in public on gay issues, particularly how they affected young people. But the High Court in Edinburgh heard he was 'polluted by deviant compulsion'. Crown QC Dorothy Bain said: 'In reality he is someone who allowed his profound interest in the sexual abuse of children to engulf his entire life.'
The extent of his obsession with under-age sex unfolded as the 10-week trial progressed. He was charged and ultimately convicted of molesting a child over a number of years, starting at the age of three months. And in an online conversation with another accused, he even expressed a wish to see children with Down's Syndrome or a learning disability sexually abused.
Operation Algebra officers found that Rennie had links with paedophiles in the US and the Netherlands. He was traced and arrested by police at the end of 2007. He was suspended from his high-profile post and by February 2008 had resigned.
Strachan also hid a dark past, in which he was jailed for three years for molesting a young boy. He was the man who sparked Operation Algebra when indecent images were found on computer equipment used by him in his work. Tests revealed 'sinister' emails between him and Rennie. They had encountered each other online in 2004 when Strachan congratulated Rennie on the content of his web page on a site known to have been misused by paedophiles.
When the case came to trial, what the jury did not know was that Strachan had offended before. He was jailed for three years in 1997 for repeatedly molesting a young boy while he was an official at a youth football club. He started abusing the child when he was five years old and the abuse went on for two years. Strachan quit his post as secretary of Celtic East Boys Club in Edinburgh after he was caught.
When he was jailed, it emerged that he had also been convicted of a similar sex offence 12 years previously. Among the charges faced by Strachan in the current trial was an allegation that he committed a serious sexual offence against a toddler at New Year from 2005 into 2006.
But Strachan, despite being one of the worst offenders in the group, was the only one of the eight men on trial who denied every charge against him. Prosecutors were forced to piece together the case against him bit by bit. Crucial to their case was a photograph partially showing a man sexually assaulting a young child. The Crown called on a world-renowned expert in human anatomy to examine the picture, known in court as The Hogmanay Image.
Pinpointing the abuser's physical traits, including a distinctive thumbnail, Professor Susan Black said there was 'strong evidence' that Strachan and the man in the picture were the same person.
SOURCE
Once more, reality intrudes on a Greenie dream
It was meant to be a carbon-neutral adventure to fire the imaginations of 25,000 schoolchildren.
Raoul Surcouf, 40, a landscape gardener from Jersey, and Richard Spink, 32, a physiotherapist from Bristol, shunned the polluting aircraft normally used to reach Greenland's polar ice cap and set sail in Fleur, a 40ft yacht fitted with solar panels and a wind turbine. Schools were poised to follow their green expedition online; once the duo had skied across the Arctic wastes they had hoped to boast of the first carbon-neutral crossing of Greenland.
On Friday, nature, displaying a heavy irony, intervened. After a battering by hurricane force winds, the crew of the Carbon Neutral Expeditions craft had to be rescued 400 miles off Ireland.
As if their ordeal wasn't terrifying enough, their saviour seemed chosen to rub salt in their wounds: a 113,000-ton tanker, Overseas Yellowstone, carrying 680,000 barrels of crude. In a statement from the tanker, Spink said: "We experienced some of the harshest conditions known, with winds gusting hurricane force 12 ... The decision was made that the risk to our personal safety was too great to continue."
In truth, the crew could not afford to be choosy. They were in a life-threatening predicament, and heaped thanks on Captain Ferro, the tanker's skipper, and his crew for being "outstanding in the execution of the rescue". But the rather awkward twist was not lost on Spink, who ruefully noted afterwards that "the team are now safely and ironically aboard the oil tanker" as they headed to Maine, where they are due to arrive in three days.
SOURCE
'Give unruly kids a right royal rollicking' (whatever that is) says British nut
School behaviour tsar spells out his solution to Britain's unruly classrooms: don't suspend pupils, just send them to the head. Talk without the cane to back it up is unlikely to achieve anything, though
A good old-fashioned bawling out in the head's office can be a better way of dealing with badly behaved pupils than suspending them, the Government's behaviour "tsar" says today. Sir Alan Steer, a former headteacher, warns that schools that frequently suspend pupils for two or three weeks at a time should review their policies because they are failing to tackle poor behaviour.
"Sending them to the head and giving them a right royal rollicking could be better than giving them a fixed-term exclusion," he said in an interview with The Independent. "Some schools seem to have very high levels of fixed-term exclusions," he said ."I don't see that as showing you're tough on discipline. It could be absolutely the opposite. It is not being very effective and you might need to rethink your strategy if a pupil is excluded again and again. They just get used to being out of school."
Sir Alan, a former head of Seven Kings school in Ilford, Essex, who is coming to the end of his four-year tenure, was speaking for the first time since his "swansong" report on discipline last month. His comments also come on the day a new report shows that bright pupils in disadvantaged schools are missing out on GCSE grades because of the anti-learning culture of other children in the school.
The report, by the education charity the Sutton Trust, revealed talented pupils in the most disadvantaged schools underperform compared to pupils from the suburbs by half a grade per GCSE.
Sir Alan also discussed his plan to enshrine in law the teacher's right to impose discipline - making measures such as detention and confiscating mobile phones legal. He considers the new powers necessary because too many parents challenge school discipline rather than support it. As a result, some schools are reluctant to use traditional methods of discipline.
Sir Alan also warned that schools are flouting a new law under which children expelled or suspended are entitled to a full-time education after six days out of the classroom. By not sticking to the rules, excluded pupils are left to roam the streets and are falling prey to gang influences. "They're not likely to go to libraries," he added.
Figures show that, while the overall number of permanent exclusions has fallen to around 8,680 a year, the number of suspensions has risen. In particular, according to figures released by the Conservatives, the number of children excluded more than 10 times in a year has tripled in four years.
Michael Gove, the shadow Education Secretary, says that headteachers should have more freedom to exclude pupils permanently by abandoning the right to appeal against exclusion, but Sir Alan said he believed Mr Gove's case to be "misleading". "It is said that 25 per cent of pupils successfully appeal," he said. "Well, there are 8,680 permanent exclusions - 970 of which went to appeal. Of these 250 were successful but only 100 of them ended with the pupil being reinstated. You can see where they got the 25 per cent figure from, just about, but the number reinstated was about 1.2 per cent of the total."
Sir Alan also wants new powers allowing teachers to search pupils for weapons, drugs and alcohol to be reviewed in three years' time to see whether they are effective. He said: "If you're faced with a 6ft 6in teenager you suspect of having a machete, I would be the first to say it's a case for bringing in the boys in blue rather than searching for it yourself."
Sir Alan, who caused controversy when he launched his latest report at the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers' conference with a declaration that "there is no behaviour crisis in schools", stuck to his guns. "I really strongly believe we don't have a crisis in our schools," he said. "We have problems and we have to tackle them but there have always been problems. Most kids are great. Why don't we think more of the 150,000 kids who are sole carers for their family - or the tens of thousands who spend hours and hours volunteering in the community? We have a tendency to be constantly negative about children."
SOURCE
Students at top British university revolt over teaching standards
A PRESTIGIOUS university has been hit by Britain's first tuition fee rebellion from hundreds of students angry at reduced teaching hours and attempts to have essays marked by undergraduates instead of lecturers. Some 600 students reading economics and finance at Bristol have signed a complaint arguing that the university has failed to improve its teaching since tuition fees were raised to more than 3,000 in 2006. Instead, they claim standards have deteriorated. In a seven-page complaint to the university they write: "Since 2006 the university has charged more and delivered less. We demand results today."
The rebellion may be copied by students at other universities as the number studying for degrees increases while funding to teach them is squeezed. It will make it harder for universities to justify a further increase in fees in a review this summer by John Denham, the universities secretary.
Eric Thomas, Bristol's vice-chancellor, has argued that the 3,145 limit on tuition fees is too low, although he acknowledges the recession has ruled out an early increase.
The protests at Bristol have been led by Robert Denham, a former grammar school pupil from Croydon, south London, and Roderick McKinley, who attended the independent Westminster school. "Bristol gives a good education, but it is not good enough," said Denham (who is not related to John Denham). "There had been a lot of general moaning but the spark was a decision to cut the length of exams from three hours to two."
One academic at Bristol, who declined to be named, said: "It has created a sensation at the university. This is the most important student rebellion in this country in a generation. They should be proud."
The complaint by Denham, McKinley and fellow students analyses the university's finances and points out how it has benefited from increased income. "Revenue per student from tuition fees has increased and we simply ask that the quality of our education be improved accordingly," it says, before listing grievances, all of which it claims have been sparked by the university's cost-cutting:
- Some student essays are already being marked by fellow undergraduates, instead of academics, in a trial that could see strugglers giving marks to high-flyers.
- The prospectus suggested lectures would be given to groups of about 100 students. In reality, they contain up to 380, although 150-200 is more typical.
- Tutorials for small groups have been withdrawn for many students. Some of the rest contain up to 30 undergraduates. "The [department] should be providing more contact with academics, not less," the complaint states.
- Money from tuition fees is being diverted to other parts of the university rather than improving education for undergraduates.
David Willetts, the Tories' shadow universities secretary, who has helped broker negotiations at Bristol, said: "The students have done a very impressive and thorough analysis of the education they are entitled to expect for paying their fees. This will be a powerful trend that universities ignore at their peril." He added: "The only way universities could ever win an argument for higher fees is to show this would benefit the students and parents paying the fees. They have to wise up."
The dispute at Bristol - which the complaint acknowledges still offers a "top-class education" - shows even the most prestigious universities are under severe pressure from Labour's mass expansion of higher education. Universities say that they may have to make thousands of redundancies to achieve 180m efficiency savings by 2011. Academics are being balloted by the University and College Union on action in support of a 6% pay claim.
The previous hike in fees sparked one of the most serious backbench rebellions of Tony Blair's premiership.
Bristol, which celebrates its centenary this year, is still negotiating with students over their complaints. A spokesman said several of the changes described by the undergraduates as a decline in quality had been carried out only after consulting them - for example, changes to class size and to exam time. He said that students were not receiving less teaching time than those studying economics and finance at rival universities.
Bristol has described as "not true" the idea that increased tuition fees were intended to lead directly to improved teaching. Instead, it says they are aimed at strengthening the finances of universities.
Bristol University came 16th in the latest Sunday Times University Guide rankings, and would have been higher but for poor student scores. It was ranked sixth by head teachers and ninth by academics, but data from the National Student Survey showed undergraduates were less positive, putting it 109th, with just 11 institutions below it.
SOURCE
Sunday, May 10, 2009
The corrupt Leftist crooks who run Britain
Despite the caution expressed below, almost all the crooks have been from the Labour party. Even the Prime Minister has been implicated. Only one Conservative member has been implicated as far as I have seen
The systematic misappropriation by MPs of the allowance paid to defray the expense of keeping a second home is one of the great scandals of modern public life. It is a story that our readers, indeed the whole country, need to be told. Now, for the first time, it can be. As The Daily Telegraph discloses today, it goes far beyond the now familiar tales of barbecue equipment, bath plugs or adult movies bought at the taxpayer's expense. Many honourable members (of all parties, because this is, explicitly, not a party political matter) have been complicit in what amounts to an officially sanctioned and sustained abuse of public funds perpetrated against their own constituents over many years.
The extent of their rapacity is astonishing; and its scale can only be fully appreciated with the disclosure of the information being published by this newspaper. It will make uncomfortable reading for the MPs, for their families and for their voters. But it is right that the public should know what has been going on. Indeed, had the House of Commons accepted a ruling by the Freedom of Information Tribunal, a body established under legislation passed by Parliament, it would already have been published....
Many have claimed tens of thousands of pounds to furnish and renovate what any reasonable person would consider to be their principal residence - the home where their families reside. A large proportion of MPs have refurbished, decorated and sold second homes at taxpayers' expense, using the allowance to pay the mortgage interest and then pocketing the profit or buying another property. Many seem to have come to regard the allowance as a basic human right to be used for the most prosaic purchase.
MPs maintain they are all acting within the rules, but that is only because they set the rules and enforce them. It is arguable that some have acted beyond the rules. Those responsible for the most egregious abuses must have known that what they were doing was far removed from the purpose of the additional costs allowance. Yet because everyone was at it, they all joined in, with few exceptions. It is clear many MPs regarded the money as theirs to be claimed whether it was proper to do so or not.
They have done so to bolster what many in the Commons consider to be an insufficient salary, currently 63,291. That may be so; and it is a matter to be considered by Sir Christopher Kelly and the independent committee on standards in public life in the inquiry now under way. This tawdry state of affairs is having a serious impact on the country's opinion of our elected representatives. A recent YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph showed that 60 per cent of voters thought worse of MPs because of what they have discovered about the allowances system. Yet the evidence seen by this newspaper demonstrates that we did not know the full story - and nor were we going to be told it even when the receipts are officially published in a few weeks' time.
Efforts are under way to clean up this mess. Some reforms were agreed last week after a somewhat ham-fisted attempt by Gordon Brown to obtain political advantage from a scandal that afflicts every party. However, the central issue of the second-home allowance was deferred to Sir Christopher's inquiry. It is essential his committee expedites its work and comes up with its recommendations before the end of the year. In view of what we know now, there can be no doubt that the current system is rotten and cannot survive.
Any system based on an allowance that MPs are encouraged to claim in order to increase their income must be abandoned. There needs to be an independent audit of expenses that will obviate the need for future publication of receipts. If a system has public trust, it is not necessary for everyone to see what MPs claim. But in order for the Augean stables to be cleansed, it is first necessary to show how filthy they have become. Today, The Daily Telegraph does just that.
More HERE
After 400 years, health and safety bans stepladders from historic Oxford library... but nobody can reach the books
Britain's ladder phobia again
Stepladders have been banned from part of Oxford University's historic Bodleian library - because of health and safety fears. The ruling by officials means that students cannot use items on the higher shelves of the Duke Humfrey reading room. However, the university is standing its ground and refusing to move the books from their 'original historic location' on the room's balcony.
As a result of the stalemate, students have to travel to libraries as far away as London to view other copies. Art History student Kelsey Williams, 21, had to travel 80 miles to London to view a copy of Arthur Johnston's 1637 work Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum after librarians refused to get it down for her. She said: 'Access to these books is necessary for my research and I wasted a day travelling to London and looking at the one in the British Library. 'It's madness because I can practically see the Bodleian's copy every time I walk into Duke Humfrey's.'
Stepladders have been used by scholars to reach books since the library was built more than 400 years ago. But the University's Health and Safety officer put his foot down last year and they were removed two weeks ago. A notice given to students requesting the books reads: 'Unable to fetch, book kept on top shelf in gallery. Due to new health and safety measures, stepladders can no longer be used.'
Laurence Benson, the library's director of administration and finance, said: 'The balcony has a low rail and we have been instructed by the health and safety office that this increases the risk. 'As part of the process the restriction on the use of ladders on the balcony have been introduced.
'The library would prefer to keep the books in their original historic location - where they have been safely consulted for 400 years prior to the instructions from the Health and Safety office.'
SOURCE
Britain's useless political police again
Mother told police she feared stalker would kill her. They didn't come. That night she was murdered. Stalkers are not as dangerous as ladders apparently
A mother of three was knifed to death by a stalker just hours after she rang police begging for help, it emerged yesterday. Mary Griffiths, a 38-year- old fitness instructor, had told friends that she was concerned for her safety because of the unwanted attentions of a man. At around 6pm on Tuesday she dialled 999 saying she was being harassed and asking for help.
Police assured her they would be with her within an hour, but never showed up. She was discovered dying from stab wounds to the chest at her home in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in the early hours of Wednesday. A 40-year-old man, who sources say had a brief relationship with her, has been detained under the Mental Health Act.
Yesterday the Independent Police Complaints Commission confirmed the matter had been referred to them. A spokesman said last night: 'The victim, Mary Griffiths, telephoned police at around 6pm on the evening prior to her death to inform them she was being harassed by a man. 'She was found seriously injured at her home early on the morning of Wednesday May 6, 2009. She was taken to West Suffolk Hospital but died there a short time later. 'Investigators will now consider the response of Suffolk police to the contact from Mary Griffiths prior to her death.'
Friends yesterday told how Miss Griffiths feared she was being stalked in the weeks leading up to her death. She had sent worried text messagesto friends, who warned her not to open the door of her 250,000 home to anyone. The three daughters from her marriage to estranged husband Jeremy, 39, were in the house at the time of the attack, but it is believed they were asleep.
A neighbour called emergency services at 2.45am after hearing screams. Armed officers were then sent to the scene.
Miss Griffiths' daughters Jessica, 13, Hannah, eight, and nineyearold Sophie were last night being cared for by their father.
Yesterday devastated family members arrived from Ireland. They were seen weeping and hugging each other outside the house. A message on flowers left by her sister Irene said: 'Don't worry, we will take care of your little princesses. I can't believe I am never going to see you again. Rest in peace sweet beautiful Mary.' Another from her brother Paul said: 'You excelled at everything you did and ended up with a beautiful family, a beautiful house and amazing friends. You'll never be forgotten little sis' by all your family. Just wish I could have been there when you needed me most of all.'
A friend, who asked not be named said: 'She was completely dedicated to her three daughters. She was devoted to them. She was an excellent mum who was there for her children and she was very caring.' Police arrested a 40-year-old man on suspicion of murder at a house two miles from the scene. He is currently receiving treatment in hospital. Details of his condition have not been released.
One of his neighbours said he believed the man had also been working as a fitness instructor and had only lived at the address for a few weeks. He added: 'I was woken up at about 3.30am by the sound of police arriving at the house. They got out of their cars and had their guns drawn. 'They went to the back fence and looked over to see him unconscious on the grass in the back garden. I heard them shouting out "armed police", but there was no response from him.
'Then paramedics turned up and started treating him for about 15 minutes. They put him on a drip before getting him on a stretcher and taking him to an ambulance.' The neighbour added: 'I have heard rumours that he was having a relationship with her (Miss Griffiths).'
IPCC Commissioner Len Jackson said: 'People will be understandably shocked and concerned by this vicious attack on a woman in her own home. It is important that we look carefully at how the police chose to respond to contact from Mary Griffiths prior to her death. 'We will therefore carry out a full and independent investigation into the police response.'
SOURCE
Gurkhas angry as British test cases snubbed
It is only huge public anger that gets a semblance of decency out of Britain's "compassionate" Leftist government. There is enormous admiration for the Gurkhas in Britain -- but not in the British government
Gurkha campaigners have voiced anger after test cases for retired Nepalese fighters to settle in Britain were rejected -- although the government hastily stepped in to try to reassure them. In a new embarrassment for Prime Minister Gordon Brown over the rights of the veteran soldiers, his immigration minister was forced to take to the airwaves at short notice to defuse the campaigners' fury on Thursday.
The snub to the Gurkhas came a day after Brown vowed to forge new plans within a month after the shock rejection by lawmakers last week of government's proposals to let only a limited number settle. Under the current rules, Britain would give residency rights to only 4,300 ex-Gurkhas, falling short of demands that they be granted to all 36,000 Nepalese ex-soldiers who served with the British army before 1997.
Indian-born British actress Joanna Lumley said after meeting Brown on Wednesday she believed she could trust him, and that the Gurkhas were counting on him to help them. But on Thursday it emerged that five Gurkhas -- including veterans of the Falklands and Gulf wars as well as the widow of another Gurkha soldier -- had had their applications to remain in Britain rejected by the government. "We trusted the prime minister to take charge of the situation. This is an outrage and a disgrace," said a spokesman for the campaign in an initial reaction.
The rejected applications were for Falklands veteran Lance Corporal Gyanendra Rai, as well as two other veterans, Deo Prakash Limbu and Chakra Prasad Limbu, and a Gurkha widow. But minutes before Lumley was due to hold a press conference to voice her ire, immigration minister Phil Woolas appeared on news channels to say the five Gurkha veterans had not been definitively rejected. He claimed the letters sent to the old soldiers said they had been rejected under current guidelines, but reassured them their cases would be reviewed under new rules to be decided by July.
In fast-moving developments, he then held impromptu talks with Lumley, before appearing at a hastily-arranged joint press conference with her at which the tension was palpable. "There are new guidelines coming forward and no action will be taken until those guidelines are in place," Woolas said, while Lumley explained she had been contacted by the prime minister's office, surprised at the rejections. "I am confident, and I can give you reassurance, that these cases will be settled in favour of the Gurkhas," the minister told Sky News television.
The government has argued that the cost of bowing to the Gurkhas' demands "could well run into billions of pounds". But lawmakers, including some from Brown's ruling Labour Party, dealt a shock defeat to the plans in parliament last week, forcing the government to think again.
About 200,000 Gurkhas fought for Britain in the two world wars and more than 45,000 died in British uniform. About 3,500 Gurkhas currently serve in the British army, including in Afghanistan.
SOURCE
`Why Al Gore is too chicken to debate me'
Christopher Monckton, the Third Viscount of Brenchley and well-known climate change sceptic, tells spiked he was censored by Gore. Challenging Wamism is to challenge the new religion of the powerful and, as in the middle ages, heretics are threatened with punishments akin to burning at the stake
Imagine if a well-known British environmentalist - Zac Goldsmith, say, or the less well-off but just as eco-committed Prince Charles - was on his way to Congress in the US to take part in a debate about climate change, only to be told at the very last minute that he was no longer welcome. That he was being denied this prestigious public-speaking platform for unspecified reasons.
There would be uproar, and understandably so. There would be op-eds and email circulars telling us that probably oil-funded, behind-the-scenes men had intervened to silence the green voice and to allow the other side - the sceptical, denying, twisted side - to have free rein in the debate. Someone would mention the c-word.
Yet reverse the roles, and replace the `silenced environmentalist' with `silenced sceptic', and no one seems to mind. At the end of last month, one of Britain's most controversial climate change sceptics - Monckton, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, or whom I prefer to call `Christopher Monckton' - was invited by Republicans to testify on climate change at the House Energy & Commerce Committee, one of the oldest standing committees in the US House of Representatives, alongside a `celebrity witness' offered up by the Democrats: none other than Al Gore. But something dramatic happened while Monckton was in the air. Upon landing in the US, he was told that he could not testify after all; that Democrats had vetoed his appearance; that, in the words of one Republican insider, Gore had `chickened out' of debating him.
`It is believed that never before in the history of Congress has the Minority been refused its choice of witness', Monckton tells me. He had been invited by Joe Barton, the ranking Minority (Republican) member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, to give testimony alongside a then unnamed `celebrity witness' put forward by the Majority (the Democrats). But as soon as the Democrats told the Republicans that Gore, maker of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, was to be their `celebrity witness', and the Republicans revealed that Monckton was to be theirs, the Democrats reportedly `immediately refused' to allow Monckton to testify. And given that the Minority had `failed' to come up with a respectable, appropriate witness, the Majority took the unusual step of choosing a new witness for them. `The one person they did not want testifying alongside Gore was me, for I would have destroyed forever what little credibility he still retains', says Monckton, cockily.
Clearly his reputation precedes him. Monckton, whose grandfather was chief legal adviser to King Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis and whose father was a much-decorated major-general in the British Army, has had a colourful (some might say coloured) career. He was an adviser to Thatcher in the 1980s. He later invented the famous geometric Eternity Puzzle. He won no votes when he tried to get elected to the House of Lords in 2007 (this being the House of Lords, it wasn't a normal, democratic election: there were 43 candidates for the seat and 47 voters). As is befitting a former Thatcherite, he has some extremely wayward views: he was involved in the right-wing Committee for a Free Britain in the 1980s, whose members, amongst other things, backed scab miners during the miners' strike of 1984/85, and in 1987 he wrote an article arguing that the only way to deal with AIDS was to `quarantine all carriers of the disease for life'. Today, Monckton is most famous, or infamous, for being a sceptic - or, in the words of one green writer, a spouter of `pseudo-scientific gibberish' (1).
Monckton says environmentalism has become a `new religion' that is intolerant of dissent. He believes Democrats refused to allow him to testify because `they know, from earlier testimonies, that I know enough about the science to expose [Al Gore's] lies in detail'. Certainly the Democrats seem keen to protect Gore, the failed president turned global prophet of man-made doom, from one of his sternest, most relentless critics. In 2007 Monckton wrote a widely distributed essay titled `Thirty-Five Inconvenient Truths: The Errors in Al Gore's Movie', and he helped with the distribution of Martin Durkin's climate-sceptic film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, to schools in the UK after it was revealed that the government planned to send Gore's film to schools. Gore, honoured with the Nobel Prize and fawned over by governments, the media and both moderate and radical greens, is more used to being treated as a secular version of the Dalai Lama - that is, Beyond Criticism - than as a mere mortal whose ideas should be submitted to the messy and potentially embarrassing rigours of public debate. Little wonder House Democrats vetoed Monckton.
Monckton, who goes further than many other climate change sceptics in that he argues there `will not be any "global warming" crisis caused by human influence on the climate', seems to believe that Gore and others are afraid to debate him because, secretly, they are uncertain of their case. This is a common belief in sceptical circles: the idea that greens run from or shun debate because they know that their science, or `The Science' as they call it, is shaky, and they are petrified of being exposed as charlatans before the eyes of the world. `The Democrats know that Gore has lied and lied and lied again to exaggerate the non-existent "threat" of "global warming"', says Monckton, `and that I would have exposed those lies in detail'. I'm not convinced. It isn't because they fear they are wrong that environmentalists are uncomfortable with debate; it is because they are utterly convinced that they are right.
It is their conviction that they are, in Gore's words, engaged in a `generational mission, with the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose', where The Science plays the role of The Truth and the CO2 plays the role of Evil, that environmentalists can brook no dissent or `heresy'. Theirs is a profoundly moralistic movement, which comes complete with stories of good and evil, and, in Gore's words, with `the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence' - and like all religious-style `generational missions' built on simplistic morality and mythical scenarios of future, weather-driven punishment for our sins, it does not lend itself to rational discussion or alternative viewpoints.
Hence its non-adherents are not just labelled `wrong', but morally suspect: they are `deniers', `heretics', even psychologically flawed (2). Real scientific investigation always involves dissent and debate; so do normal political projects. But a `shared and unifying cause' that is stuffed with goodies and baddies and is designed to allow those `suffering from a loss of meaning in their lives to find hope' (yes, Gore again) does not. History tells us that.
Environmentalism is innately, almost casually, hostile to dissenting views. From the Democrats turning away Monckton, to greens who complain that sceptics are given too much media coverage, to the demand that there should be future criminal tribunals to try and punish `climate change deniers', environmentalists do not conspiratorially draw up blacklists of unacceptable individuals who must never be allowed to challenge their `lies' but, even more worryingly, simply assume that open debate is potentially destructive and that dissenters are dangerous.
So the UK climate change minister, Ed Miliband, recently said that opposing windfarms should be as `socially unacceptable as failing to wear a seat belt'. And in a recent debate with climate change sceptics at a film festival in Amsterdam, Franny Armstrong, director of the much-lauded (including by Miliband) The Age of Stupid, predicted - without a flicker of shame - that in 50 years' time, when `hundreds of millions of people have died [as a result of runaway climate change]', there will be an `environmental court [and] climate sceptics will be charged with those murders' (3).
In short, the words of sceptics are murderous. These sceptics - Monckton, David Bellamy, Nigel Lawson, Bjorn Lomborg - will be as guilty of murder in Bangladesh and other parts of the world reportedly threatened by climate change as if they had strangled those poor people with their own hands. The erosion of the distinction between words and actions, and the explicit attempt to make it socially taboo to raise awkward questions about the politics and science of environmentalism, speaks to a rather terrifyingly censorious streak in the green outlook, and reveals the extent to which non-debate is being normalised across society. This is something worse than a behind-closed-doors conspiracy to protect Al Gore's `lies' from irritating challengers, as Monckton seems to see it. It is the slow but sure, instinctive and all-encompassing creation of what John Stuart Mill called `custom': a new general way of seeing things, a new kind of conformism, of the sort which, as Mill said, `stands as a hindrance to human advancement'. Custom is the enemy of freedom and progress, said Mill: `The progressive principle, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom.' (4)
Monckton sees environmentalism as a monstrous creation of the left. `Logic and the left are strangers to one another', he says. Yet while the vast majority of the left has embraced environmentalism in recent years, there is little `left wing' about the green outlook. Indeed, the rise and rise of environmentalism, which springs more from the traditionalist, aristocratic desire for conservationism than it does from old left-wing projects for progress and development, can be seen as representing the death knell of once-progressive left-wing politics.
Where people on the left once argued that the problems facing humanity were social ones, requiring social solutions, today they see everything from unemployment to Third World poverty as a `natural problem' that requires restrictions on individual behaviour in order to prevent further planetary destruction. Where once the left argued that we needed more production and consumption in order to liberate humanity from need, today they say we must have less in order to liberate the planet from man's `carbon footprint'. Environmentalism is not `the left' in action; it is the ideology that has replaced the end of politics and in particular the demise of the left's once principled insistence on social visions of the future and on the creation of more resources for the benefit of humanity.
This, too, explains the lack of debate today. When the problems we face were recognised as social, the onus was on political contestation and debate, as different groups with different social visions clashed about how things should be fixed and improved in the future. When the problems we face are re-labelled as issues of `natural limits' - with only one possible fixed solution: reshaping people's behaviour in order to prevent them from recklessly transgressing those `natural limits' - then it is intolerable for people to dissent or to demand more or to question the consensus. To do so is not only wrong or risqu or daring, it is potentially destructive and harmful to future generations. It is the equivalent of murder, or at least of driving a car without wearing a seat belt. Environmentalism simply cannot countenance true, meaningful debate.
SOURCE
IT'S A BARGAIN! BRITISH CLIMATE BILL MAY ONLY COST 20,000 PER FAMILY
Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband admits the cost of laws aimed at tackling global warming has soared to 404 billion. Laws aimed at tackling global warming could cost every family in Britain a staggering 20,000 - double the original forecast. Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband admitted the bill for introducing legislation to cut greenhouse gases had soared from 205billion to 404billion between now and 2050.
But in figures quietly released to Parliament, the Cabinet minister claimed the benefits to the UK would be more than 1trillion - a tenfold increase on the 110billion predicted last year. Last night Mr Miliband was accused of entering 'Alice in Wonderland territory' with the figures in an attempt to stifle concern about the price of bringing in the Climate Change Act. Senior Tory MP Peter Lilley said Mr Miliband 'heavily massaged' the statistics to 'remove embarrassment' that the laws represented poor value for money.
But ministers insist the costs of not acting on climate change would be higher than the price of acting now. Under the Climate Change Act, the Government is committed to cut carbon emissions, blamed for global warming, by 80 per cent before 2050. Originally the Government wanted to cut emissions by 60 per cent, with maximum costs of 205billion and benefits of 110billion. But the figure rose to 80 per cent after a threatened backbench revolt last year.
The extra cost was only revealed after the Bill became law in November. Four months later Mr Miliband slipped out revised figures in the House of Commons Library to avoid scrutiny, say critics. They show the cost, which the Government says represents the predicted difference between the economy with and without carbon-constraining measures, had soared to a worst-case scenario of 404billion - in the region of 20,000.
Mr Lilley, a former Trade Secretary, said he accepted a reduction in global warming would cost a lot. But in a letter to Mr Miliband he said: 'When it comes to your revised estimates of the benefits we enter Alice in Wonderland territory.'
Mr Miliband said the benefits had risen because a global deal on tackling carbon emissions was more likely because Britain had passed the Climate Change Act. He denied the figures were framed to produce a convenient answer.
SOURCE
Despite the caution expressed below, almost all the crooks have been from the Labour party. Even the Prime Minister has been implicated. Only one Conservative member has been implicated as far as I have seen
The systematic misappropriation by MPs of the allowance paid to defray the expense of keeping a second home is one of the great scandals of modern public life. It is a story that our readers, indeed the whole country, need to be told. Now, for the first time, it can be. As The Daily Telegraph discloses today, it goes far beyond the now familiar tales of barbecue equipment, bath plugs or adult movies bought at the taxpayer's expense. Many honourable members (of all parties, because this is, explicitly, not a party political matter) have been complicit in what amounts to an officially sanctioned and sustained abuse of public funds perpetrated against their own constituents over many years.
The extent of their rapacity is astonishing; and its scale can only be fully appreciated with the disclosure of the information being published by this newspaper. It will make uncomfortable reading for the MPs, for their families and for their voters. But it is right that the public should know what has been going on. Indeed, had the House of Commons accepted a ruling by the Freedom of Information Tribunal, a body established under legislation passed by Parliament, it would already have been published....
Many have claimed tens of thousands of pounds to furnish and renovate what any reasonable person would consider to be their principal residence - the home where their families reside. A large proportion of MPs have refurbished, decorated and sold second homes at taxpayers' expense, using the allowance to pay the mortgage interest and then pocketing the profit or buying another property. Many seem to have come to regard the allowance as a basic human right to be used for the most prosaic purchase.
MPs maintain they are all acting within the rules, but that is only because they set the rules and enforce them. It is arguable that some have acted beyond the rules. Those responsible for the most egregious abuses must have known that what they were doing was far removed from the purpose of the additional costs allowance. Yet because everyone was at it, they all joined in, with few exceptions. It is clear many MPs regarded the money as theirs to be claimed whether it was proper to do so or not.
They have done so to bolster what many in the Commons consider to be an insufficient salary, currently 63,291. That may be so; and it is a matter to be considered by Sir Christopher Kelly and the independent committee on standards in public life in the inquiry now under way. This tawdry state of affairs is having a serious impact on the country's opinion of our elected representatives. A recent YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph showed that 60 per cent of voters thought worse of MPs because of what they have discovered about the allowances system. Yet the evidence seen by this newspaper demonstrates that we did not know the full story - and nor were we going to be told it even when the receipts are officially published in a few weeks' time.
Efforts are under way to clean up this mess. Some reforms were agreed last week after a somewhat ham-fisted attempt by Gordon Brown to obtain political advantage from a scandal that afflicts every party. However, the central issue of the second-home allowance was deferred to Sir Christopher's inquiry. It is essential his committee expedites its work and comes up with its recommendations before the end of the year. In view of what we know now, there can be no doubt that the current system is rotten and cannot survive.
Any system based on an allowance that MPs are encouraged to claim in order to increase their income must be abandoned. There needs to be an independent audit of expenses that will obviate the need for future publication of receipts. If a system has public trust, it is not necessary for everyone to see what MPs claim. But in order for the Augean stables to be cleansed, it is first necessary to show how filthy they have become. Today, The Daily Telegraph does just that.
More HERE
After 400 years, health and safety bans stepladders from historic Oxford library... but nobody can reach the books
Britain's ladder phobia again
Stepladders have been banned from part of Oxford University's historic Bodleian library - because of health and safety fears. The ruling by officials means that students cannot use items on the higher shelves of the Duke Humfrey reading room. However, the university is standing its ground and refusing to move the books from their 'original historic location' on the room's balcony.
As a result of the stalemate, students have to travel to libraries as far away as London to view other copies. Art History student Kelsey Williams, 21, had to travel 80 miles to London to view a copy of Arthur Johnston's 1637 work Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum after librarians refused to get it down for her. She said: 'Access to these books is necessary for my research and I wasted a day travelling to London and looking at the one in the British Library. 'It's madness because I can practically see the Bodleian's copy every time I walk into Duke Humfrey's.'
Stepladders have been used by scholars to reach books since the library was built more than 400 years ago. But the University's Health and Safety officer put his foot down last year and they were removed two weeks ago. A notice given to students requesting the books reads: 'Unable to fetch, book kept on top shelf in gallery. Due to new health and safety measures, stepladders can no longer be used.'
Laurence Benson, the library's director of administration and finance, said: 'The balcony has a low rail and we have been instructed by the health and safety office that this increases the risk. 'As part of the process the restriction on the use of ladders on the balcony have been introduced.
'The library would prefer to keep the books in their original historic location - where they have been safely consulted for 400 years prior to the instructions from the Health and Safety office.'
SOURCE
Britain's useless political police again
Mother told police she feared stalker would kill her. They didn't come. That night she was murdered. Stalkers are not as dangerous as ladders apparently
A mother of three was knifed to death by a stalker just hours after she rang police begging for help, it emerged yesterday. Mary Griffiths, a 38-year- old fitness instructor, had told friends that she was concerned for her safety because of the unwanted attentions of a man. At around 6pm on Tuesday she dialled 999 saying she was being harassed and asking for help.
Police assured her they would be with her within an hour, but never showed up. She was discovered dying from stab wounds to the chest at her home in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in the early hours of Wednesday. A 40-year-old man, who sources say had a brief relationship with her, has been detained under the Mental Health Act.
Yesterday the Independent Police Complaints Commission confirmed the matter had been referred to them. A spokesman said last night: 'The victim, Mary Griffiths, telephoned police at around 6pm on the evening prior to her death to inform them she was being harassed by a man. 'She was found seriously injured at her home early on the morning of Wednesday May 6, 2009. She was taken to West Suffolk Hospital but died there a short time later. 'Investigators will now consider the response of Suffolk police to the contact from Mary Griffiths prior to her death.'
Friends yesterday told how Miss Griffiths feared she was being stalked in the weeks leading up to her death. She had sent worried text messagesto friends, who warned her not to open the door of her 250,000 home to anyone. The three daughters from her marriage to estranged husband Jeremy, 39, were in the house at the time of the attack, but it is believed they were asleep.
A neighbour called emergency services at 2.45am after hearing screams. Armed officers were then sent to the scene.
Miss Griffiths' daughters Jessica, 13, Hannah, eight, and nineyearold Sophie were last night being cared for by their father.
Yesterday devastated family members arrived from Ireland. They were seen weeping and hugging each other outside the house. A message on flowers left by her sister Irene said: 'Don't worry, we will take care of your little princesses. I can't believe I am never going to see you again. Rest in peace sweet beautiful Mary.' Another from her brother Paul said: 'You excelled at everything you did and ended up with a beautiful family, a beautiful house and amazing friends. You'll never be forgotten little sis' by all your family. Just wish I could have been there when you needed me most of all.'
A friend, who asked not be named said: 'She was completely dedicated to her three daughters. She was devoted to them. She was an excellent mum who was there for her children and she was very caring.' Police arrested a 40-year-old man on suspicion of murder at a house two miles from the scene. He is currently receiving treatment in hospital. Details of his condition have not been released.
One of his neighbours said he believed the man had also been working as a fitness instructor and had only lived at the address for a few weeks. He added: 'I was woken up at about 3.30am by the sound of police arriving at the house. They got out of their cars and had their guns drawn. 'They went to the back fence and looked over to see him unconscious on the grass in the back garden. I heard them shouting out "armed police", but there was no response from him.
'Then paramedics turned up and started treating him for about 15 minutes. They put him on a drip before getting him on a stretcher and taking him to an ambulance.' The neighbour added: 'I have heard rumours that he was having a relationship with her (Miss Griffiths).'
IPCC Commissioner Len Jackson said: 'People will be understandably shocked and concerned by this vicious attack on a woman in her own home. It is important that we look carefully at how the police chose to respond to contact from Mary Griffiths prior to her death. 'We will therefore carry out a full and independent investigation into the police response.'
SOURCE
Gurkhas angry as British test cases snubbed
It is only huge public anger that gets a semblance of decency out of Britain's "compassionate" Leftist government. There is enormous admiration for the Gurkhas in Britain -- but not in the British government
Gurkha campaigners have voiced anger after test cases for retired Nepalese fighters to settle in Britain were rejected -- although the government hastily stepped in to try to reassure them. In a new embarrassment for Prime Minister Gordon Brown over the rights of the veteran soldiers, his immigration minister was forced to take to the airwaves at short notice to defuse the campaigners' fury on Thursday.
The snub to the Gurkhas came a day after Brown vowed to forge new plans within a month after the shock rejection by lawmakers last week of government's proposals to let only a limited number settle. Under the current rules, Britain would give residency rights to only 4,300 ex-Gurkhas, falling short of demands that they be granted to all 36,000 Nepalese ex-soldiers who served with the British army before 1997.
Indian-born British actress Joanna Lumley said after meeting Brown on Wednesday she believed she could trust him, and that the Gurkhas were counting on him to help them. But on Thursday it emerged that five Gurkhas -- including veterans of the Falklands and Gulf wars as well as the widow of another Gurkha soldier -- had had their applications to remain in Britain rejected by the government. "We trusted the prime minister to take charge of the situation. This is an outrage and a disgrace," said a spokesman for the campaign in an initial reaction.
The rejected applications were for Falklands veteran Lance Corporal Gyanendra Rai, as well as two other veterans, Deo Prakash Limbu and Chakra Prasad Limbu, and a Gurkha widow. But minutes before Lumley was due to hold a press conference to voice her ire, immigration minister Phil Woolas appeared on news channels to say the five Gurkha veterans had not been definitively rejected. He claimed the letters sent to the old soldiers said they had been rejected under current guidelines, but reassured them their cases would be reviewed under new rules to be decided by July.
In fast-moving developments, he then held impromptu talks with Lumley, before appearing at a hastily-arranged joint press conference with her at which the tension was palpable. "There are new guidelines coming forward and no action will be taken until those guidelines are in place," Woolas said, while Lumley explained she had been contacted by the prime minister's office, surprised at the rejections. "I am confident, and I can give you reassurance, that these cases will be settled in favour of the Gurkhas," the minister told Sky News television.
The government has argued that the cost of bowing to the Gurkhas' demands "could well run into billions of pounds". But lawmakers, including some from Brown's ruling Labour Party, dealt a shock defeat to the plans in parliament last week, forcing the government to think again.
About 200,000 Gurkhas fought for Britain in the two world wars and more than 45,000 died in British uniform. About 3,500 Gurkhas currently serve in the British army, including in Afghanistan.
SOURCE
`Why Al Gore is too chicken to debate me'
Christopher Monckton, the Third Viscount of Brenchley and well-known climate change sceptic, tells spiked he was censored by Gore. Challenging Wamism is to challenge the new religion of the powerful and, as in the middle ages, heretics are threatened with punishments akin to burning at the stake
Imagine if a well-known British environmentalist - Zac Goldsmith, say, or the less well-off but just as eco-committed Prince Charles - was on his way to Congress in the US to take part in a debate about climate change, only to be told at the very last minute that he was no longer welcome. That he was being denied this prestigious public-speaking platform for unspecified reasons.
There would be uproar, and understandably so. There would be op-eds and email circulars telling us that probably oil-funded, behind-the-scenes men had intervened to silence the green voice and to allow the other side - the sceptical, denying, twisted side - to have free rein in the debate. Someone would mention the c-word.
Yet reverse the roles, and replace the `silenced environmentalist' with `silenced sceptic', and no one seems to mind. At the end of last month, one of Britain's most controversial climate change sceptics - Monckton, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, or whom I prefer to call `Christopher Monckton' - was invited by Republicans to testify on climate change at the House Energy & Commerce Committee, one of the oldest standing committees in the US House of Representatives, alongside a `celebrity witness' offered up by the Democrats: none other than Al Gore. But something dramatic happened while Monckton was in the air. Upon landing in the US, he was told that he could not testify after all; that Democrats had vetoed his appearance; that, in the words of one Republican insider, Gore had `chickened out' of debating him.
`It is believed that never before in the history of Congress has the Minority been refused its choice of witness', Monckton tells me. He had been invited by Joe Barton, the ranking Minority (Republican) member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, to give testimony alongside a then unnamed `celebrity witness' put forward by the Majority (the Democrats). But as soon as the Democrats told the Republicans that Gore, maker of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, was to be their `celebrity witness', and the Republicans revealed that Monckton was to be theirs, the Democrats reportedly `immediately refused' to allow Monckton to testify. And given that the Minority had `failed' to come up with a respectable, appropriate witness, the Majority took the unusual step of choosing a new witness for them. `The one person they did not want testifying alongside Gore was me, for I would have destroyed forever what little credibility he still retains', says Monckton, cockily.
Clearly his reputation precedes him. Monckton, whose grandfather was chief legal adviser to King Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis and whose father was a much-decorated major-general in the British Army, has had a colourful (some might say coloured) career. He was an adviser to Thatcher in the 1980s. He later invented the famous geometric Eternity Puzzle. He won no votes when he tried to get elected to the House of Lords in 2007 (this being the House of Lords, it wasn't a normal, democratic election: there were 43 candidates for the seat and 47 voters). As is befitting a former Thatcherite, he has some extremely wayward views: he was involved in the right-wing Committee for a Free Britain in the 1980s, whose members, amongst other things, backed scab miners during the miners' strike of 1984/85, and in 1987 he wrote an article arguing that the only way to deal with AIDS was to `quarantine all carriers of the disease for life'. Today, Monckton is most famous, or infamous, for being a sceptic - or, in the words of one green writer, a spouter of `pseudo-scientific gibberish' (1).
Monckton says environmentalism has become a `new religion' that is intolerant of dissent. He believes Democrats refused to allow him to testify because `they know, from earlier testimonies, that I know enough about the science to expose [Al Gore's] lies in detail'. Certainly the Democrats seem keen to protect Gore, the failed president turned global prophet of man-made doom, from one of his sternest, most relentless critics. In 2007 Monckton wrote a widely distributed essay titled `Thirty-Five Inconvenient Truths: The Errors in Al Gore's Movie', and he helped with the distribution of Martin Durkin's climate-sceptic film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, to schools in the UK after it was revealed that the government planned to send Gore's film to schools. Gore, honoured with the Nobel Prize and fawned over by governments, the media and both moderate and radical greens, is more used to being treated as a secular version of the Dalai Lama - that is, Beyond Criticism - than as a mere mortal whose ideas should be submitted to the messy and potentially embarrassing rigours of public debate. Little wonder House Democrats vetoed Monckton.
Monckton, who goes further than many other climate change sceptics in that he argues there `will not be any "global warming" crisis caused by human influence on the climate', seems to believe that Gore and others are afraid to debate him because, secretly, they are uncertain of their case. This is a common belief in sceptical circles: the idea that greens run from or shun debate because they know that their science, or `The Science' as they call it, is shaky, and they are petrified of being exposed as charlatans before the eyes of the world. `The Democrats know that Gore has lied and lied and lied again to exaggerate the non-existent "threat" of "global warming"', says Monckton, `and that I would have exposed those lies in detail'. I'm not convinced. It isn't because they fear they are wrong that environmentalists are uncomfortable with debate; it is because they are utterly convinced that they are right.
It is their conviction that they are, in Gore's words, engaged in a `generational mission, with the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose', where The Science plays the role of The Truth and the CO2 plays the role of Evil, that environmentalists can brook no dissent or `heresy'. Theirs is a profoundly moralistic movement, which comes complete with stories of good and evil, and, in Gore's words, with `the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence' - and like all religious-style `generational missions' built on simplistic morality and mythical scenarios of future, weather-driven punishment for our sins, it does not lend itself to rational discussion or alternative viewpoints.
Hence its non-adherents are not just labelled `wrong', but morally suspect: they are `deniers', `heretics', even psychologically flawed (2). Real scientific investigation always involves dissent and debate; so do normal political projects. But a `shared and unifying cause' that is stuffed with goodies and baddies and is designed to allow those `suffering from a loss of meaning in their lives to find hope' (yes, Gore again) does not. History tells us that.
Environmentalism is innately, almost casually, hostile to dissenting views. From the Democrats turning away Monckton, to greens who complain that sceptics are given too much media coverage, to the demand that there should be future criminal tribunals to try and punish `climate change deniers', environmentalists do not conspiratorially draw up blacklists of unacceptable individuals who must never be allowed to challenge their `lies' but, even more worryingly, simply assume that open debate is potentially destructive and that dissenters are dangerous.
So the UK climate change minister, Ed Miliband, recently said that opposing windfarms should be as `socially unacceptable as failing to wear a seat belt'. And in a recent debate with climate change sceptics at a film festival in Amsterdam, Franny Armstrong, director of the much-lauded (including by Miliband) The Age of Stupid, predicted - without a flicker of shame - that in 50 years' time, when `hundreds of millions of people have died [as a result of runaway climate change]', there will be an `environmental court [and] climate sceptics will be charged with those murders' (3).
In short, the words of sceptics are murderous. These sceptics - Monckton, David Bellamy, Nigel Lawson, Bjorn Lomborg - will be as guilty of murder in Bangladesh and other parts of the world reportedly threatened by climate change as if they had strangled those poor people with their own hands. The erosion of the distinction between words and actions, and the explicit attempt to make it socially taboo to raise awkward questions about the politics and science of environmentalism, speaks to a rather terrifyingly censorious streak in the green outlook, and reveals the extent to which non-debate is being normalised across society. This is something worse than a behind-closed-doors conspiracy to protect Al Gore's `lies' from irritating challengers, as Monckton seems to see it. It is the slow but sure, instinctive and all-encompassing creation of what John Stuart Mill called `custom': a new general way of seeing things, a new kind of conformism, of the sort which, as Mill said, `stands as a hindrance to human advancement'. Custom is the enemy of freedom and progress, said Mill: `The progressive principle, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom.' (4)
Monckton sees environmentalism as a monstrous creation of the left. `Logic and the left are strangers to one another', he says. Yet while the vast majority of the left has embraced environmentalism in recent years, there is little `left wing' about the green outlook. Indeed, the rise and rise of environmentalism, which springs more from the traditionalist, aristocratic desire for conservationism than it does from old left-wing projects for progress and development, can be seen as representing the death knell of once-progressive left-wing politics.
Where people on the left once argued that the problems facing humanity were social ones, requiring social solutions, today they see everything from unemployment to Third World poverty as a `natural problem' that requires restrictions on individual behaviour in order to prevent further planetary destruction. Where once the left argued that we needed more production and consumption in order to liberate humanity from need, today they say we must have less in order to liberate the planet from man's `carbon footprint'. Environmentalism is not `the left' in action; it is the ideology that has replaced the end of politics and in particular the demise of the left's once principled insistence on social visions of the future and on the creation of more resources for the benefit of humanity.
This, too, explains the lack of debate today. When the problems we face were recognised as social, the onus was on political contestation and debate, as different groups with different social visions clashed about how things should be fixed and improved in the future. When the problems we face are re-labelled as issues of `natural limits' - with only one possible fixed solution: reshaping people's behaviour in order to prevent them from recklessly transgressing those `natural limits' - then it is intolerable for people to dissent or to demand more or to question the consensus. To do so is not only wrong or risqu or daring, it is potentially destructive and harmful to future generations. It is the equivalent of murder, or at least of driving a car without wearing a seat belt. Environmentalism simply cannot countenance true, meaningful debate.
SOURCE
IT'S A BARGAIN! BRITISH CLIMATE BILL MAY ONLY COST 20,000 PER FAMILY
Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband admits the cost of laws aimed at tackling global warming has soared to 404 billion. Laws aimed at tackling global warming could cost every family in Britain a staggering 20,000 - double the original forecast. Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband admitted the bill for introducing legislation to cut greenhouse gases had soared from 205billion to 404billion between now and 2050.
But in figures quietly released to Parliament, the Cabinet minister claimed the benefits to the UK would be more than 1trillion - a tenfold increase on the 110billion predicted last year. Last night Mr Miliband was accused of entering 'Alice in Wonderland territory' with the figures in an attempt to stifle concern about the price of bringing in the Climate Change Act. Senior Tory MP Peter Lilley said Mr Miliband 'heavily massaged' the statistics to 'remove embarrassment' that the laws represented poor value for money.
But ministers insist the costs of not acting on climate change would be higher than the price of acting now. Under the Climate Change Act, the Government is committed to cut carbon emissions, blamed for global warming, by 80 per cent before 2050. Originally the Government wanted to cut emissions by 60 per cent, with maximum costs of 205billion and benefits of 110billion. But the figure rose to 80 per cent after a threatened backbench revolt last year.
The extra cost was only revealed after the Bill became law in November. Four months later Mr Miliband slipped out revised figures in the House of Commons Library to avoid scrutiny, say critics. They show the cost, which the Government says represents the predicted difference between the economy with and without carbon-constraining measures, had soared to a worst-case scenario of 404billion - in the region of 20,000.
Mr Lilley, a former Trade Secretary, said he accepted a reduction in global warming would cost a lot. But in a letter to Mr Miliband he said: 'When it comes to your revised estimates of the benefits we enter Alice in Wonderland territory.'
Mr Miliband said the benefits had risen because a global deal on tackling carbon emissions was more likely because Britain had passed the Climate Change Act. He denied the figures were framed to produce a convenient answer.
SOURCE
Saturday, May 09, 2009
More disrespect for a Christian heritage
Queen's Trinity Cross honour deemed unlawful by Britain's Privy Council, sitting as a court of appeal: Unlawful in terms of the Trinidad & Tobago constitution, not in terms of Britain's constitution, as Britain has no written constitution, just a set of customs. Unmentioned below is why the medal is called the "Trinity" cross. "Trinidad" is Spanish for Trinity. Will they change the name of their island now too?
Old medal above, replacement below
An honour established by the Queen has been declared unlawful after Muslims and Hindus complained that its Christian name and cross insignia were offensive. The Trinity Cross of the Order of Trinity was established by the Queen 40 years ago to recognise distinguished service and gallantry in the former colony of Trinidad and Tobago. It has been received by 62 people including the cricketers Garfield Sobers and Brian Lara, the novelist V. S. Naipaul and many of the islands' leading politicians and diplomats.
The Privy Council in London has ruled that the decoration is unconstitutional because it discriminates against non-Christians. Five British law lords said that the creation of the honour breached the right to equality and the right to freedom of conscience and belief. The implications of the ruling on British decorations are being studied by lawyers at the Cabinet Office, which oversees the honours system. A spokesman said: "We have noted the judgment and are monitoring the situation."
A parliamentary review of British honours has already recommended streamlining the system with new titles that have no reference to Christian saints or symbols.
The Trinity Cross was established in 1969 and took precedence over all other decorations except the Victoria Cross and George Cross. The title and choice of insignia followed six years of consultation and research of national awards in other countries. Questions were raised, though, about the overtly Christian nature of the words "Trinity" and "Cross" and the use of a cross insignia, which led to some of those nominated refusing to accept the decoration. Lord Hope of Craighead, in his Privy Council judgment, said that the Trinity Cross was "perceived by Hindus and Muslims living in Trinidad and Tobago as an overtly Christian symbol both in name and in substance". He said that it breached the islands' Constitution of 1976.
The law lords refused to make the order retrospective, meaning that the recipients will not be stripped of their honours.
The legal case had been brought by groups representing Trinidad and Tobago's Muslim and Hindu communities, which account for about 30 per cent of the Caribbean islands' population of 1.3 million. The High Court of Trinidad and Tobago ruled in 2004 that the decoration discriminated against non-Christians but said that it did not have the power to invalidate the royal order. The Court of Appeal upheld the ruling. The island's Cabinet has already agreed that the name of its highest national award should be renamed the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and that the Order of the Trinity would become the Distinguished Society of Trinidad and Tobago. They also said that the decoration would be redesigned, with the cross replaced by a medal.
The islands, which attained independence in 1962, are among the most prosperous countries in the Caribbean. The Queen is expected to visit in November when they host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
A review of the British honours system by the Commons Public Administration Select Committee in 2004 recommended reducing the number of decorations from twelve to four, with the new proposed titles having no reference to the Cross or Christian saints. Paul Flynn, a Labour member of the committee, said: "The titles are now meaningless, they are the remnant of another age and I don't think they have any particular Christian significance." The committee did not consider the issue of religious discrimination, with most of the controversy relating to the use of the word Empire in honours titles and the confusing and archaic nature of the system.
Benjamin Zephaniah, the black poet, publicly rejected his honour in 2003, saying that the title of the Order of the British Empire gave an impression of white supremacy. Last year Christine Grahame, an SNP member of the Scottish Parliament, described the George Medal, one of the highest civilian awards for bravery, as "clearly very Anglocentric" and unsuitable for Scots. She suggested replacing it with a nationalist award such as a "St Andrews Medal".
Hugh Peskett, editor-in-chief of Burke's Peerage and Gentry, said that changing the names of titles to remove their Christian references would destroy hundreds of years of history. "Part of the significance of an honour is its antiquity and I can see no reason why they should be changed," he said.
SOURCE
Britain's dumb border control again
They catch illegals arriving and then send them to a place where they can just walk right out the door.
Organised criminal gangs have exploited a children's home beside Heathrow airport for the systematic trafficking of Chinese children to work in prostitution and the drugs trade across Britain, a secret immigration document reveals.
The intelligence report from the Border and Immigration Agency, obtained by the Guardian, shows how a 59-bed local authority block has been used as a clearing house for a trade in children that stretches across four continents. At least 77 Chinese children have gone missing since March 2006 from the home, operated by the London borough of Hillingdon. Only four have been found. Two girls returned after a year of exploitation in brothels in the Midlands. One was pregnant while the other had been surgically fitted with a contraceptive device in her arm. Others are coerced with physical threats to work as street-sellers of counterfeit goods. It is thought that many work in cannabis farms.
The report, marked "restricted", reveals that victims of a trafficking network that has agents based as far apart as China, Brazil, Japan, Malaysia and Kenya arrive at the home just outside the airport perimeter, only to disappear almost immediately. It states: "The absconding may be at the facilitation of organised crime groups and the children may then be exploited for financial gain."
The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is facing calls from the opposition to explain how the home came to be exploited by traffickers. "This report appears to highlight a scandalous situation in our immigration system," said the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling. "To have such a large number of children going missing when they are supposed to be in care is unacceptable. We need an urgent explanation from the home secretary."
The report, by the immigration agency's national intelligence unit, was passed to the Guardian by a source concerned that too little action was being taken to tackle the problem. It says Chinese children arrive alone on flights to Heathrow before they are picked up by border officials and taken into local authority care. In two thirds of cases, they disappear quickly - most within a week and many within 24 hours. Many flee during fire drills and 10 have jumped out of windows. Others simply walk out of the front door into waiting cars.
Hillingdon council said the disappearances seemed "planned and coordinated" by criminal gangs. "They were being trafficked and there has been organised movement through the facility," said Julian Worcester, the deputy director of children's services. He said the number of Chinese children coming through Heathrow had declined recently as a result of attempts to disrupt the networks, but the most recent figures show the problem remains. Between April and December 2008, 13 of the 41 Chinese children taken into care in Hillingdon disappeared.
"There is still a large proportion who go missing but the total numbers are going down," said Worcester. "As a result of coordinated action, Heathrow is now seen as a more difficult airport to traffic people through. We think some of the activity has been displaced to other airports, in particular Stansted in Essex and Manchester." There is no suggestion that anyone involved in the administration of the home is responsible for aiding the traffickers. Other residents have fled situations in troubled countries, including Iraq and Somalia, and have not been trafficked.
Chinese children now account for a quarter of all suspected trafficking cases involving under 18s.
MPs and campaign groups are increasingly concerned at the number of suspected victims of trafficking who are going missing from local authority care. Last week, the Home Office's child exploitation and online protection centre said one in five suspected victims of child trafficking were missing from care. "The Hillingdon experience is of such national significance that it cannot be swept under the carpet," said Christine Beddoe, the chief executive of Ecpat UK, a charity that campaigns against child trafficking. "We have been calling on government for an inquiry into missing children for years. Every year we are ignored, hundreds more children are being exploited. Does it require another death like Victoria Climbi for the government to act?"
Minutes of a recent meeting about Chinese child trafficking attended by officers from the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the UK Human Trafficking Centre revealed a "lack of will to deal with child trafficking cases" among police child abuse investigation teams.
Ping Hayward, the director of the Chinese Community Centre in London, said: "This is a hidden and underground part of Chinese life."
SOURCE
The Islamic NHS
The NHS just tells a Muslim dentist not to discriminate, rather than penalize him in any way for doing so. Will it be different this time? Unlikely. Muslims must be treated as if they are made of spun glass. I predict a token fine which will change nothing
A Muslim dentist refused to treat patients unless they wore traditional Islamic dress, it was alleged today. Omer Butt, 32, ordered women to put on head scarves or he would not register them or their families at his NHS-funded clinic, it was claimed. At least two patients were left in pain after they declined to follow his self-imposed rules, the General Dental Council heard.
It is the second time that the dentist - who is the brother of a former spokesman of the radical Islamic group al-Muhajiroun - has appeared before the council's disciplinary panel on similar allegations. Two years ago he was reprimanded for telling an Asian mother-of-two he would not register her unless she wore the Muslim hijab. The GDC heard how Butt believed it was his duty to stop Muslim patients committing what he believed was Al-Kaba'ir, a re
Queen's Trinity Cross honour deemed unlawful by Britain's Privy Council, sitting as a court of appeal: Unlawful in terms of the Trinidad & Tobago constitution, not in terms of Britain's constitution, as Britain has no written constitution, just a set of customs. Unmentioned below is why the medal is called the "Trinity" cross. "Trinidad" is Spanish for Trinity. Will they change the name of their island now too?
Old medal above, replacement below
An honour established by the Queen has been declared unlawful after Muslims and Hindus complained that its Christian name and cross insignia were offensive. The Trinity Cross of the Order of Trinity was established by the Queen 40 years ago to recognise distinguished service and gallantry in the former colony of Trinidad and Tobago. It has been received by 62 people including the cricketers Garfield Sobers and Brian Lara, the novelist V. S. Naipaul and many of the islands' leading politicians and diplomats.
The Privy Council in London has ruled that the decoration is unconstitutional because it discriminates against non-Christians. Five British law lords said that the creation of the honour breached the right to equality and the right to freedom of conscience and belief. The implications of the ruling on British decorations are being studied by lawyers at the Cabinet Office, which oversees the honours system. A spokesman said: "We have noted the judgment and are monitoring the situation."
A parliamentary review of British honours has already recommended streamlining the system with new titles that have no reference to Christian saints or symbols.
The Trinity Cross was established in 1969 and took precedence over all other decorations except the Victoria Cross and George Cross. The title and choice of insignia followed six years of consultation and research of national awards in other countries. Questions were raised, though, about the overtly Christian nature of the words "Trinity" and "Cross" and the use of a cross insignia, which led to some of those nominated refusing to accept the decoration. Lord Hope of Craighead, in his Privy Council judgment, said that the Trinity Cross was "perceived by Hindus and Muslims living in Trinidad and Tobago as an overtly Christian symbol both in name and in substance". He said that it breached the islands' Constitution of 1976.
The law lords refused to make the order retrospective, meaning that the recipients will not be stripped of their honours.
The legal case had been brought by groups representing Trinidad and Tobago's Muslim and Hindu communities, which account for about 30 per cent of the Caribbean islands' population of 1.3 million. The High Court of Trinidad and Tobago ruled in 2004 that the decoration discriminated against non-Christians but said that it did not have the power to invalidate the royal order. The Court of Appeal upheld the ruling. The island's Cabinet has already agreed that the name of its highest national award should be renamed the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and that the Order of the Trinity would become the Distinguished Society of Trinidad and Tobago. They also said that the decoration would be redesigned, with the cross replaced by a medal.
The islands, which attained independence in 1962, are among the most prosperous countries in the Caribbean. The Queen is expected to visit in November when they host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
A review of the British honours system by the Commons Public Administration Select Committee in 2004 recommended reducing the number of decorations from twelve to four, with the new proposed titles having no reference to the Cross or Christian saints. Paul Flynn, a Labour member of the committee, said: "The titles are now meaningless, they are the remnant of another age and I don't think they have any particular Christian significance." The committee did not consider the issue of religious discrimination, with most of the controversy relating to the use of the word Empire in honours titles and the confusing and archaic nature of the system.
Benjamin Zephaniah, the black poet, publicly rejected his honour in 2003, saying that the title of the Order of the British Empire gave an impression of white supremacy. Last year Christine Grahame, an SNP member of the Scottish Parliament, described the George Medal, one of the highest civilian awards for bravery, as "clearly very Anglocentric" and unsuitable for Scots. She suggested replacing it with a nationalist award such as a "St Andrews Medal".
Hugh Peskett, editor-in-chief of Burke's Peerage and Gentry, said that changing the names of titles to remove their Christian references would destroy hundreds of years of history. "Part of the significance of an honour is its antiquity and I can see no reason why they should be changed," he said.
SOURCE
Britain's dumb border control again
They catch illegals arriving and then send them to a place where they can just walk right out the door.
Organised criminal gangs have exploited a children's home beside Heathrow airport for the systematic trafficking of Chinese children to work in prostitution and the drugs trade across Britain, a secret immigration document reveals.
The intelligence report from the Border and Immigration Agency, obtained by the Guardian, shows how a 59-bed local authority block has been used as a clearing house for a trade in children that stretches across four continents. At least 77 Chinese children have gone missing since March 2006 from the home, operated by the London borough of Hillingdon. Only four have been found. Two girls returned after a year of exploitation in brothels in the Midlands. One was pregnant while the other had been surgically fitted with a contraceptive device in her arm. Others are coerced with physical threats to work as street-sellers of counterfeit goods. It is thought that many work in cannabis farms.
The report, marked "restricted", reveals that victims of a trafficking network that has agents based as far apart as China, Brazil, Japan, Malaysia and Kenya arrive at the home just outside the airport perimeter, only to disappear almost immediately. It states: "The absconding may be at the facilitation of organised crime groups and the children may then be exploited for financial gain."
The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is facing calls from the opposition to explain how the home came to be exploited by traffickers. "This report appears to highlight a scandalous situation in our immigration system," said the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling. "To have such a large number of children going missing when they are supposed to be in care is unacceptable. We need an urgent explanation from the home secretary."
The report, by the immigration agency's national intelligence unit, was passed to the Guardian by a source concerned that too little action was being taken to tackle the problem. It says Chinese children arrive alone on flights to Heathrow before they are picked up by border officials and taken into local authority care. In two thirds of cases, they disappear quickly - most within a week and many within 24 hours. Many flee during fire drills and 10 have jumped out of windows. Others simply walk out of the front door into waiting cars.
Hillingdon council said the disappearances seemed "planned and coordinated" by criminal gangs. "They were being trafficked and there has been organised movement through the facility," said Julian Worcester, the deputy director of children's services. He said the number of Chinese children coming through Heathrow had declined recently as a result of attempts to disrupt the networks, but the most recent figures show the problem remains. Between April and December 2008, 13 of the 41 Chinese children taken into care in Hillingdon disappeared.
"There is still a large proportion who go missing but the total numbers are going down," said Worcester. "As a result of coordinated action, Heathrow is now seen as a more difficult airport to traffic people through. We think some of the activity has been displaced to other airports, in particular Stansted in Essex and Manchester." There is no suggestion that anyone involved in the administration of the home is responsible for aiding the traffickers. Other residents have fled situations in troubled countries, including Iraq and Somalia, and have not been trafficked.
Chinese children now account for a quarter of all suspected trafficking cases involving under 18s.
MPs and campaign groups are increasingly concerned at the number of suspected victims of trafficking who are going missing from local authority care. Last week, the Home Office's child exploitation and online protection centre said one in five suspected victims of child trafficking were missing from care. "The Hillingdon experience is of such national significance that it cannot be swept under the carpet," said Christine Beddoe, the chief executive of Ecpat UK, a charity that campaigns against child trafficking. "We have been calling on government for an inquiry into missing children for years. Every year we are ignored, hundreds more children are being exploited. Does it require another death like Victoria Climbi for the government to act?"
Minutes of a recent meeting about Chinese child trafficking attended by officers from the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the UK Human Trafficking Centre revealed a "lack of will to deal with child trafficking cases" among police child abuse investigation teams.
Ping Hayward, the director of the Chinese Community Centre in London, said: "This is a hidden and underground part of Chinese life."
SOURCE
The Islamic NHS
The NHS just tells a Muslim dentist not to discriminate, rather than penalize him in any way for doing so. Will it be different this time? Unlikely. Muslims must be treated as if they are made of spun glass. I predict a token fine which will change nothing
A Muslim dentist refused to treat patients unless they wore traditional Islamic dress, it was alleged today. Omer Butt, 32, ordered women to put on head scarves or he would not register them or their families at his NHS-funded clinic, it was claimed. At least two patients were left in pain after they declined to follow his self-imposed rules, the General Dental Council heard.
It is the second time that the dentist - who is the brother of a former spokesman of the radical Islamic group al-Muhajiroun - has appeared before the council's disciplinary panel on similar allegations. Two years ago he was reprimanded for telling an Asian mother-of-two he would not register her unless she wore the Muslim hijab. The GDC heard how Butt believed it was his duty to stop Muslim patients committing what he believed was Al-Kaba'ir, a re