The primary site for this blog mirror is HERE. Dissecting Leftism is HERE (and mirrored here). The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here. Other mirror sites: Greenie Watch, Political Correctness Watch, Education Watch, Immigration Watch, Food & Health Skeptic, Gun Watch, Socialized Medicine, Dissecting Leftism, Recipes, Tongue Tied and Australian Politics. For a list of backups viewable in China, see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing) See here or here for the archives of this site
****************************************************************************************



31 October, 2009

A black thug encouraged by milksop British justice

An English Premier League footballer with a history of violence against women was today sentenced to 18 months in jail for punching a student in the face. Marlon King, a Jamaican international and striker for Wigan Athletic, was found guilty of sexually assaulting a 20-year-old woman and breaking her nose with a single powerful punch after she spurned his aggressive sexual advances.

He becomes the highest-profile English footballer to be sent to prison since Joey Barton, the Newcastle United midfielder, was jailed for six months in May last year for beating a teenager in the street.

In the five years before the nightclub assault, King was found guilty of a trio of similar attacks on women, it can now be reported. He was first convicted of common assaults on two women he chased through Soho with a belt wrapped round his fist in 2003. Three years later, he was convicted of threatening behaviour after slapping a woman on the head and bottom and then spitting at her when police arrived to intervene. King’s criminal record also included dishonesty, drink driving and other motoring offences. Only one of his convictions, for receiving a stolen £30,000 ($54,209) BMW, resulted in a prison sentence _ 18 months reduced to nine on appeal. Apart from a couple of community penalties, he was invariably fined and able to continue his football career. He is thought to have earned around £40,000 per week since joining Wigan Athletic last year.

Today, he will go to prison knowing that his professional football career is over at the highest-level. Dave Whelan, the Wigan chairman, announced his sacking immediately after the verdict and he is unlikely to be employed as a footballer again in Britain.

The footballer, who has not played a match this season, was found guilty at Southwark Crown Court for the assault that took place in the Soho Revue Bar last December. King, who was born in South London, was in the bar to celebrate his wife’s pregnancy and the fact that he had scored the winning goal in a match a few hours earlier.

The jury heard that he was repeatedly “cold-shouldered” by women that night. When a slightly-built university student became the latest to recoil from his advances, he lost his temper and in an outburst of “completely gratuitous violence” he lashed out, “smashing” her to the floor. The court heard that his single clenched fist blow was so powerful that two other women – one of them holding on to his arm – were also knocked from their feet.

During the trial, the victim said: “I felt someone grab my left buttock. I turned around because I was quite disgusted and shocked. There was a man standing towards the bar, smirking at me in a suggestive way. I said quite firmly, ‘Don’t touch me, it’s not nice.'” The prosecution explained that King had then grabbed the woman’s wrist before punching her in the face causing a broken nose, black eye and split lip.

While bouncers moved in to restrain the muscular £5m striker, friends rushed to the aid of his victim. As she was helped to her feet, blood poured from her shattered nose.

The 29-year-old player, claimed he was a victim of “mistaken identity”. But after hearing overwhelming evidence from a string of witnesses, including a football coach who insisted King was the assailant, the jury decided he was lying.

Roger Daniells-Smith, for the prosecution, said that since the age of 17 the Jamaica international had found himself in the dock on seven previous occasions. Had the Crown made a “bad character” application on time the jury would have been told about his previous convictions. But their bid to introduce his background was made on the first day of his trial and rejected by Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith.

As he handed down the sentence, the judge said: “You have shown not a hint of shame at your disgraceful and arrogant behaviour. “Furthermore it is not your first criminal offence, nor your first for violence. This was just a single punch but it came some minutes after you being asked again and again to leave.

Referring to King’s wage packet and the fact his contract would be revoked costing him more than £1million, the judge added: “I appreciate this will cost you an enormous amount of money, but it is difficult to be sympathetic when you were boasting about your earnings in the way you did.” He told the player in addition to the jail sentence, he would have to register as a sex offender for seven years, pay £3,125 compensation to his victim and £1,800 prosecution costs.

As the sentence was spelt out, several of King’s supporters stormed from court swearing at the judge. One, pointing at the judge, screamed: “This is a clear case of institutional racism. You should not be up there... Up the National Front. Heil Hitler.” Another, referring to footballer Steven Gerrard’s acquittal for affray, shouted “Look at you. You are all white. Steven Gerrard is still walking the streets.”

SOURCE



Loony Britain again: Parents banned from watching their children in playgrounds... in case they are paedophiles

Parents are being banned from playing with their children in council recreation areas because they have not been vetted by police. Mothers and fathers are being forced to watch their children from outside perimeter fences because of fears they could be paedophiles. Watford Council was branded a 'disgrace' yesterday after excluding parents from two fenced-off adventure playgrounds unless they first undergo criminal record checks.

Children as young as five will instead be supervised by council 'play rangers' who have been cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau. Councillors insist they are merely following Government regulations and cannot allow adults to walk around playgrounds 'unchecked'. But furious parents attacked the move and threatened to boycott the playgrounds.

Concerns were raised last night that other councils around the country are adopting similar policies amid confusion over Government rules and increasing hysteria over child protection. It comes amid an escalating row over the Government's new anti-paedophile database, which will contain the names of more than 11million adults cleared to work with children and vulnerable adults.

Mother-of-five Marcella Bergin, 35, from Watford, who has been visiting the play areas for many years, said: 'It's like they are branding all parents potential paedophiles, which is disgraceful. 'Ninety-nine per cent of people are great parents and certainly not child abusers.' Mother-of-eight Jenny Abbasi, 41, whose children also use the playgrounds, said the new rules were 'a disgrace'. Miss Abbasi, from Garston, Hertfordshire, said: 'I have been using the playgrounds for 18 years and it's a sad day when parents cannot be involved with the enjoyment of their children.'

The rules were imposed at Harwoods and Harebreaks adventure recreation grounds from this week. Activities on the half-acre sites include a skateboard half-pipe, a zip line and rope swings. Play rangers patrol both parks - which are for children aged five to 15 - and are fully qualified with CRB checks.

Parents already have to 'register' their child on arrival so staff have their contact details in the event of an accident. But now only those who have been selected for CRB vetting by the council can enter the sites. Mayor Dorothy Thornhill argued the council was merely enforcing government policy at the play areas. 'Sadly, in today's climate, you can't have adults walking around unchecked in a children's playground and the adventure playground is not a meeting place for adults,' she said.

But the Tories claimed the row showed the Government's ' heavy- handed' approach to safeguarding was 'completely out of control'.

SOURCE



Patient dies after British doctors failed to diagnose broken pelvis in 'chaotic' hospital

A woman who had been run over by a minibus that left a tyre mark across her trousers died after staff at a "chaotic" hospital failed to diagnose her broken pelvis. Susan Haigh, 50, told paramedics she could feel no pain and was able to walk after the accident, but she had actually suffered two fractures and a torn bladder. The injuries were not picked up by medics at Barnsley District Hospital A&E department, South Yorkshire, which was short staffed and in a state of "chaos" when Mrs Haigh was admitted, an inquest heard.

A breakdown in communication meant doctors were not informed that she could have been suffering from serious crush injuries and the tyre marks and blood on her white jeans had not been pointed out.

Mrs Haigh was assessed and then discharged by Dr Jane Brenchley, a consultant, on Saturday May 3 2008, despite protests from her daughters who insisted she was in pain. She was readmitted the next day and rushed to intensive care, but died three days later after medics discovered two pelvic fractures.

The inquest in Sheffield heard that paramedic Andrew Flavell, who was called to the scene of the accident, saw the tyre mark on her jeans and told Nurse Pam Whittaker that he suspected crush injuries when they arrived at hospital. Mrs Haigh was put on a trolley in a corridor and Nurse Whittaker passed on the information to A&E coordinator Tom Holmes, but was only 98 per cent sure she mentioned the tyre mark.

However, details about the patient were not written down because it was not hospital policy at the time. She had also not been properly assessed by a nurse before being seen by a consultant.

Mr Holmes told the inquest that the hospital, which has five nurses and three doctors, was understaffed and on the night in question it was "quite chaotic." "We were busy from the onset of the shift and it just deteriorated," he added. He said that Nurse Whittaker had not expressed any urgent concern for Mrs Haigh and said he could not remember being told about the tyre mark. "The consultant has seen the patient and made the decision. My own personal feeling was that "it's a consultant, things must be OK."

Mr Holmes added that Dr Brenchley, who was on call, seemed "annoyed" at being asked to come into hospital.

The inquest heard that Mrs Haigh, from Goldthorpe, Barnsley, had been involved in a row with a group of women when she fell under the wheels of a minibus during a night out. The back wheel of the bus ran over her legs.

SOURCE



British Teachers who were afraid to discipline thuggish minority of Muslim pupils for fear of being branded racist

He gave his name as Henry Webster when he stepped into the witness box at the High Court in London last week. But he wasn't the Henry Webster his family and friends remember. The real Henry Webster was a strapping 6ft 2in rugby player, not someone who struggled to string sentences together and had to be given painkillers to complete his evidence.

Instead of preparing for college or university, he has been left with learning difficulties, short-term memory loss, and epilepsy. Henry will settle for that because the alternative would have meant not being here at all.

This is the only upside of being attacked with a claw hammer that left an inch-deep impression on his skull. One claw hammer and 12 teenage thugs versus one young man. Those were the odds when a gang of Asian youths ambushed him. After their work was done, his attackers punched the air in triumph - 'that's what you call Paki bashing,' they yelled.

The thugs have all been jailed. Not all the culprits, however, have been brought to book - not in the eyes of Henry's family, anyway. They believe teachers at his school, near Swindon - where the assault took place in 2007 when Henry was just 15 - are as guilty as the actual perpetrators themselves. Why? Because, they say, the school allowed ethnic minority pupils to get away with flagrant misbehaviour, and then handed them less severe punishments than their white classmates because staff feared they might otherwise be accused of racism. In other words, a culture of ' educational apartheid' prevailed in all but name at Ridgeway School.

Had this not been the case, Henry's parents insist, their son would probably not have sustained brain damage outside the school tennis courts one day in January nearly three years ago. They have now brought a civil action against Ridgeway and are seeking compensation of up to £1 million. The allegations amount to a devastating indictment not just of Ridgeway, but of policies that were supposed to lead to integration, not segregation, in our schools.

Our own investigation into the events which culminated in Henry Webster being left for dead within walking distance of his classroom does little to counter that view. Remember, this is not some inner city hell hole. Swindon (population 200,000) is often used for market research purposes precisely because it is considered to be a typical British town; neither the best nor the worst place to live, just average.

Ridgeway School, too, is average. Only about 70 - 5 per cent - of the 1,400 or so pupils are from ethnic minorities. Exam results are good, and the school continues to receive glowing government reports. Only last year, Ridgeway's headmaster Steven Colledge, who took over in September 2006, was praised by Ofsted inspectors as 'Outstanding' for his 'leadership and management' skills.

But anyone who saw his performance on Channel 4 News the day after Henry Webster was attacked might beg to differ. 'I think there is always a danger where there is a mixture of races and peoples which reflect the community we live in that any tension that might exist, any little scuffle or fight, can be twisted to be much more of a major thing than it really is,' he told the cameras. No, this is not a misquotation. He really did use the words 'little scuffle' to describe the attack in which Henry Webster was left brain damaged. Furthermore, in the immediate aftermath, neither the 'outstanding' Mr Colledge nor any of his colleagues visited the Webster family or even sent a get well card. Mr Colledge later told a governors' inquiry that gestures such as sending cards or flowers 'were not in his nature'.

Parents and former staff say that multiculturalism at Ridgeway, under his leadership, meant pupils on both sides of the religious and cultural divide breathing the same air but sharing very little else. Asian youngsters, we have been told, had their own officially designated meeting room which, to all intents and purposes, became the unofficial base for a 30-strong crew known as the 'Asian Invasion' and the 'Broad Street Massive'. Many, if not all 12, of those convicted of assaulting Henry belonged to the gang and lived mainly in the vicinity of Broad Street in Swindon. Four of them were still pupils at Ridgeway. They would often call older relatives and friends from outside school to settle disputes.

One such was Wasif Khan, then 18, who was the person who wielded the claw hammer. He was a 'wannabe militant', according to the police, and carried on his mobile phone a screensaver of the collapse of the World Trade Centre. A number of accomplices used social networking sites to communicate their message. One said: 'Play with a gun, play with a knife, play with a Bangli [Bangladeshi] and you'll lose your life.' A second posting featured a soundtrack with anti-Western lyrics.

There's no suggestion that these poisonous views were shared by the majority of the Asian pupils at Ridgeway - in fact, bar the members of the gang who attacked Henry, there were generally very good relations between the Asian and white pupils. Most have no interest whatsoever in violence. Equally, there are inevitably white children at the school who have been guilty of reprehensible behaviour. But the disturbing, and disproportionate, influence the Broad Street Massive is said to have exercised over the life of Ridgeway School is revealed in statements summarised in court papers obtained by the Mail, from parents, pupils and former staff.

All are expected to give evidence for the Websters in the High Court over the next few weeks. Racial intimidation and violence, they say, was commonplace and escalated into a mass fight on the school tennis courts after Asian gang members threatened 'warfare' against white pupils. Yet the school's extreme sensitivity on ethnic issues allegedly allowed the thuggish minority to believe they were 'untouchable'....

Ms Barker, a trainee teacher at the school for three months in 2005, said that when she first heard a pupil had been attacked in Swindon she 'knew instinctively' that it had to be at Ridgeway.' I think staff found it relatively easy to cope with the unruly white pupils, but the Asian pupils were in a league of their own. I think one of the reasons there were such problems with discipline was because the school did not promote a positive culture of cohesion and integration.

'I felt the school was letting down its pupils; all that was needed was some education for the pupils in terms of respect and good discipline. The Asian pupils at the school were allowed to think of themselves as superior. This was partly the fault of the school because the Asian pupils would never be disciplined or, if they were, they would receive a lesser punishment than the white pupils.' ...

More here



Thousands of British nursery school children branded racist by teachers... before they know what the word means

As many as 40,000 youngsters a year are being wrongly branded racists as new rules force schools to investigate every playground spat, according to a new report. Children in nurseries and primary schools are being disciplined over racist insults even before they know what the terms mean, it claimed.

A growing army of diversity 'missionaries' may be fuelling tensions instead of easing them, warned the report from the Manifesto Club civil liberties group. These race advisers and bureaucrats are said to be increasing the divide between white and black youngsters by forcing them to see the world through the filter of race.

The report said a child had been severely disciplined for calling two other children a 'chocolate bar'. Another child had been punished for calling a boy 'white trash'. Report author Adrian Hart said: 'The obligation on schools to report these incidents wastes teachers' time, interferes in children's space in the playground, and undermines teachers' ability to deal with problems in their classrooms. 'Worse, such anti-racist policies can create divisions where none had existed, by turning everyday playground spats into "race issues". 'There are a small number of cases of sustained targeted bullying, and schools certainly need to deal with those. 'But most of these 'racist incidents' are just kids falling out. They don't need re-educating out of their prejudice - they and their teachers need to be left alone.'

Under rules introduced in 2002, schools must monitor and report all racist incidents to their local authority. Teachers are required to fill in special referral forms detailing the incident and punishment. According to the report The Myth of Racist Kids, around 280,000 incidents have been reported in England since full records began. Many involve pupils still at primary school, it said. Out of 5,000 incidents in Yorkshire in 2006/07, for example, the majority were in primary schools. Meanwhile Essex County Council figures show that most of the children involved in reported racist incidents were between nine and 11.

One teacher told researchers that anti-racist interventions had led to 'an absolutely awful atmosphere around the school'. 'Children who used to play beautifully together are starting to separate along racial lines,' the teacher said.

The Manifesto Group is calling for 'adult politics' not to be projected on to children and compulsory reporting of racist incidents to be abolished.

Martin Ward, deputy general secretary of the Association of of School and College Leaders, said: 'Certainly any racist incident in schools should be dealt with swiftly but the definition of racism can be taken too far, especially with young children who clearly don't understand the connotation behind the words.'

But Schools Minister Diana Johnson said: 'If racist bullying is not dealt with in schools, then this will send a powerful message to children that racism is acceptable - not only in schools but in society as a whole.'

SOURCE



Snoring cure?

Hadi Al-Jassim's team of consultants are the only ones in the country to offer an injection which they say is a genuine alternative to painful surgery. The ear, nose and throat specialist - from Southport and Ormskirk NHS Trust near Liverpool - has treated 400 patients at one of his hospitals and with excellent results.

"As everyone knows, snoring can cause major problems for patients and in particular their partners," said Mr Al-Jassim. "In most cases it's the men who snore and their partners suffer sleep deprivation and at the end of the day you have to keep your partner happy - though women do snore as well. "It causes all sorts of problems between partners and leads to marital, social and health problems. "I am delighted with the treatment because, until this, there has been no effective treatment other than surgery."

The treatment - called the snoreplasty - is quick and cheap. It is a two-minute procedure done under local anaesthetic in which sodium tetradecyl is injected into the roof of the mouth. The chemical, a sclerosing agent, is usually used in the treatment of varicose veins. The injection combats snoring by stopping the soft tissue at the back of the mouth from vibrating.

Mr Al-Jassim, who is now giving lectures to other specialists across the country about the jab, added: "Surgical treatment is very painful and takes weeks of recovery time so many patients decide not to do it because they can't get the time off work or their health's not strong enough for surgery. "And in other cases surgery doesn't work. "After the jab, patients can go home straight away and eat about an hour later. "It will help around 70 per cent of sufferers and has made life easier for many patients and their partners. "Even with those people it hasn't cured, they reported sleeping better and waking up feeling fresher. "The jab can be given three times a year but some people find one injection lasts them a year."

SOURCE



Must not mention that young people often enjoy taking risks



We read:

"The possibility of death is what makes the Duke of Edinburgh Award popular, Prince Edward said yesterday while commenting on an Australian schoolboy's agonising death while lost in the bush. Edward's comments have made him a target for the British press who are comparing him to his gaffe-prone father, Prince Philip.

In an interview with The Australian yesterday Prince Edward was asked about Sydney schoolboy David Iredale, who died in December 2006 in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Iredale was on a bushwalk he undertook without supervision as part of his Duke of Edinburgh Award, a program that rewards young people for doing outdoor challenges.

The Queen's youngest son who is seventh in line to the British throne and chairman of the Duke of Edinburgh Award, said the scheme remains popular because it offers the possibility of deadly danger.

The Prince said he was not aware of the circumstances of the Iredale case, but recounted that when a young man died while participating in a Duke of Edinburgh activity in Britain in the program's early years, interest in the scheme soared. "All the trustees were convinced that (the boy's death) was the end of it, that it would never go any further," Prince Edward said. "And Lord Hunt, the man who masterminded the first successful ascent of Everest and was first director of the award, said: 'No, no, no, do nothing ... Just wait and see."'

The prince recalled that, in the days following the death, the number of inquiries from young people wanting to learn more about the award and how they could get involved skyrocketed. "And he (Lord Hunt) said, 'There you go, that's typical young people'," Prince Edward said.

Source

The same thing happens when a tourist gets eaten by a crocodile in Northern Australia: Tourism enquiries soar.



Guns banned in Britain but still a “modern pestilence” there: "The most senior judge in England and Wales delivered a severe warning against gun crime yesterday as he increased the sentence on the gang member who armed the killer of schoolboy Rhys Jones from seven years to twelve. James Yates, now 21, was given seven years’ detention at Liverpool Crown Court in January for possession of a prohibited firearm and for assisting the killer, Sean Mercer, 18. But yesterday Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, increased the sentence, saying that Yates’s “gravest culpability” was in handing over the gun to his friend for reasons of gang warfare and misplaced gang loyalty. It was taken to a public place and “an innocent child was gunned down”. Lord Judge branded the use of guns a “modern pestilence”".

Stop outlawing jobs: "The Trade Union Congress (TUC) is calling for the UK national minimum wage to be increased to £6 an hour from October 2010. In Scotland a government committee suggests the public naming and shaming and an increase in fines for employers who break the minimum wage. While in Jersey the Employment Forum has outlined plans to increase the minimum wage to £6.20. The sound of breaking windows fills the British Isles. The timing of this is awful — not [that] there ever is a good time to outlaw jobs — but with unemployment set to continue to rise into next year, those at the margins will of course be adversely affected by restrictions on employer and employee.”





30 October, 2009

Inheritance rights for co-habiting couples coming in Britain

Co-habiting couples with children would be given automatic inheritance rights, like a married couple, under controversial new proposals. If one died without leaving a will, the survivor would be entitled to at least a share of their estate. Couples without children would qualify to be treated the same as a married couple after five years' living together. After just two years, the survivor of a childless couple would be entitled to half the estate. The remainder would pass to whoever is next in line, such as parents or siblings.

The proposals from the Law Commission would apply equally to gay and straight couples. Under current laws, couples who are unmarried and not in a civil partnership have no automatic rights to a share of a partner's estate if there is no will. This can lead to 'significant hardship' when one dies unexpectedly, said the Commission's Professor Elizabeth Cooke. She said the changes would remove, for the bereaved, the need for 'emotionally and financially draining' legal action. Her report says research has shown that the proposals 'match public expectations and attitudes'.

But critics say they will deal yet another blow to the institution of marriage, by removing another incentive to wed. Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank said: 'Marriage is increasingly fragile as an institution. It is less popular, and yet we know it is associated with the best outcomes for children. 'People who marry are doing the rest of us a favour. They make a life-long commitment which benefits not only their children but the wider society. 'This needs to be recognised, even if only in small ways. If you give marriage and cohabiting equal status then the incentive to make that commitment was weakened.'

The number of unmarried couples has risen sharply over the past decade, while marriage has been declining. Analysis by the Office for National Statistics found that in the ten years between 1996 and 2006, the number of cohabiting couples rose by 65 per cent from 1.4million to 2.3million. The number of married couples fell by 4 per cent to 12.1million.

It is estimated that as many as 350,000 people die each year without making a will, even though some have vast fortunes. Four-fifths of cohabiting couples have not made a will.

The Law Commission consultation paper, Intestacy And Family Provision Claims On Death, says living together is both 'an accepted family form' in itself and a natural step towards marriage. Professor Cooke said: 'When a family member dies, the process of grieving, and of adjustment to change, can be made far worse by uncertainty and anxiety about money or belongings. 'It is vital that the law remains relevant and up to date, reflecting the reality of modern society and the reasonable expectations of those who have been bereaved.' She said that even where the survivors of unmarried couples win a settlement in court, they tend to be receive less than married claimants.

The Commission also proposed changes to inheritance rules for married couples without wills. Currently, spouses are entitled to the first £250,000 and personal possessions, but in cases where more is left they may have to share with children, siblings or parents. The Commission said married couples without children should receive everything.

SOURCE



The man who's a disgrace to British justice

Ever since it was introduced by Tony Blair's government in 1998, the Human Rights Act has done more to diminish the sense of fair play and natural justice in this country than any other piece of legislation. That is why, to his credit, David Cameron has pledged to replace it with a more carefully drafted Bill of Rights that will restore balance in favour of the victims of crime.

The howls of outrage from the Left have been utterly predictable. But What is far more troubling is the intervention of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, who came forward this week to attack the Tory plans head-on. This would be the same Keir Starmer who, as a practising barrister, made a considerable fortune out of the Human Rights Act. One of its original champions, he was named Human Rights Lawyer Of The Year in 2001 and has written a plethora of books and articles on the subject.

Yet once he accepted the position as DPP, Starmer should have set aside his private beliefs. He is supposed to be a politically-neutral servant of the Crown; independent, not a Left-wing flag-bearer for an Act that, time and again, has betrayed ordinary people's sense of fair play.

This, after all, is the same Human Rights Act that upheld a prisoner's right to donate sperm. That prevented the Italian teenager who murdered headmaster Philip Lawrence from being deported. That allowed the Afghan nationals who hijacked a plane at Stansted to remain in Britain.

Like any fair-minded citizen, Cameron is not opposed to the 'human rights' aspect of the Act, just the way it has been hijacked by the Left to allow illegal immigrants to stay, prevent foreign criminals from being deported and encourage suspected criminals to seek refuge in this country. Only this week a court ruled that an illegal immigrant should not be deported as it would breach his human right to a family because he and his girlfriend now had a cat together. Such cases make a mockery of the British courts.

Starmer argues the principles enshrined in the Act are ' fundamental', and that to abandon it would bring 'shame' on Britain. The real shame, however, is that a public official is being so disgracefully partisan.

SOURCE



Criminal record checks are turning Britain into a nation of suspects

Ignoring a child in distress used to be unheard of. But vetting by the new Independent Safeguarding Authority will mean every adult is a potential criminal – and children will be no safer, argues Philip Johnston

Have you been ISA-cleared? If you want a new job then you had soon better be. According to Sir Roger Singleton, head of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (the aforementioned ISA), a clean bill of health from his fledgling organisation will become as important as a professional qualification for any aspiring employee. It will announce to the world that you are not a paedophile, that you have not assaulted a child and do not pose a danger to vulnerable old people. The state will have decreed that you are not a monster.

If you are coming around slowly to the view that this country is going mad then confirmation came yesterday with Sir Roger’s comments in this newspaper. It is now, apparently, considered perfectly reasonable to regard the entire adult population as a potential pool of criminal suspects. Indeed, new figures from the Justice Department show that an increasing number of people is being criminalised, principally the over-40s who have never been in trouble with the police and have never really done anything wrong apart from breaking the speed limit occasionally. The number of over-40s receiving a first conviction or caution has increased by half since 2001 and is now running at 65 a day. The figures reflect the fact that many of Labour’s new spot fines for ''crimes’’ such as overfilling a wheelie bin are aimed at householders.

As Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: ''Labour have criminalised a generation and treated tens of thousands of law-abiding middle-aged and elderly citizens like villains.’’ Since October 12, an estimated 11.3 million people have been subject to a new “vetting and barring” regime that means it is now a criminal offence, punishable by a £5,000 fine, for individuals without ISA clearance to work or apply to work with children or vulnerable adults in a wide range of posts – including most NHS jobs, the Prison Service, education and childcare. Most will have to pay £64 towards the cost of setting up the database. Employers also face criminal sanctions for knowingly employing a barred individual across a wider range of work. Although the scheme is now running, registration is being phased in and starts for new workers or for those moving jobs in July.

The ISA was set up in response to the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman by Ian Huntley in Soham in 2002, and employs about 200 staff with an annual budget of £40 million. Even though the Soham inquiry reserved much of its criticism for a failure to follow up Huntley’s references when he was applying for a job as a school caretaker, the Government decided that an all-embracing vetting agency was required.

A few weeks ago there was uproar when it became clear how far the tentacles of the new authority would extend. Even the NSPCC said it threatened “perfectly safe and normal activities” and risked alienating the public and discouraging volunteers. Other campaign groups and opposition parties denounced its scale and scope.

Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, responded by calling on Sir Roger to carry out a review, invariably a government’s way of cooling a furore while changing nothing. He was asked to look again at whether the definition of “frequent” contact in the legislation would mean that ad hoc arrangements – such as taking children to football matches – would fall foul of the law. It seems that they will. “It is reasonable to expect of the person who is doing that driving that there’s no known reason why he shouldn’t work with children,” said Sir Roger. Unsurprisingly, the ISA has been inundated with letters criticising the scheme and Sir Roger said it would be “foolish to blindly ignore” the public outrage over the pervasive nature of the scheme.

Yet far from reducing the scope of this scheme, Sir Roger suggested that the reach of the database could actually increase because companies, even those whose work did not normally involve contact with children, would see commercial advantage in asking employees to get an ISA check. “The electrical contractor who wants school business may decide that although he is not required to have all his electricians registered with the ISA, there is a tendering advantage to doing so,” said Sir Roger.

It had been thought that this scheme would be limited only to those who regularly come into contact with children as an essential part of their jobs, notably teachers, though they have long been subject to special checks. But the ISA registration will be needed by doctors, dentists, opticians and others whose clients might include children. If Sir Roger is right and businesses believe that it is important to be ISA registered, where will it stop? Sweet shop owners whose regular customers are children may feel obliged to sign up and display their ISA certificate. So, too, would plumbers, decorators or electricians who need to enter homes where children could be present. Corgi-registered and ISA-cleared will become the dual badges of professional competence and moral respectability. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands more people are being drawn into the clutches of the ISA and information about them placed on its database indefinitely.

The problem is that it is likely to put children at greater risk. This is because someone “cleared’’ by the checks (which might, after all, be based upon false or incomplete information) will be assumed to be trustworthy and no other questions will be asked. When the task of checking the bona fides of people is proxied out to state agencies they are then considered infallible, when invariably they are not. Direct checks on personal references and testimonials of the sort that used to be carried out are likely to be far more effective. Moreover, we are developing a poisonous culture of suspicion that discourages adults from stepping in to help children in trouble for fear of being considered a potential molester or of being reported to the police. In France and several other countries, it is an offence not to help anyone, including a child, in difficulty and distress. In this country, we are being encouraged to walk on by in case we are considered an assailant.

Child protection has become a vast, self-perpetuating industry whose very existence depends upon maintaining the fiction that all adults are potentially harmful to children. Perversely, even though most abusers are known to the abused, and children are most at risk from relatives or their friends, the new ISA scheme excludes family or private arrangements. What sort of society is it where adults suspect other adults, and children are taught to suspect anyone other than their parents, who are often the people who cause them greatest harm?

Adults who volunteer their time to coach children in sports, or run Scout and Guide organisations, or adventure outings are being put off doing so in their thousands. There are stories of people who have a conviction from childhood for stealing sweets from the village shop being told they cannot enter a scout hut to collect their own child. For those who have never been in trouble with the police and never will be, there is the ignominy of being subjected to a criminal check, the assumption being that they might offend one day. The hoary old justification that “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” just does not wash. Why should everyone be placed on a government database in the belief that they might turn out to be an offender? The same mentality seeks to justify retaining the DNA of innocent people on a database that now contains the profiles of 10 per cent of the population and seeks to make everyone possess an ID card.

Volunteers used to be the bedrock of society; yet adults whose experience and advice are invaluable to youngsters are giving up because it is no longer worth the candle. Surveys have found that one in three men has been put off offering to train a sports team or run a scout group – at a time when the Government wants all children to have adult “mentors” to guide their career choice from the age of seven.

An obsession with health and safety, an unwillingness to accept that there is an element of risk in everything we do and a requirement for virtually everyone dealing with children to be subjected to a criminal record check have turned volunteering into something unwarrantedly expensive, bureaucratic and intrusive. And to what end? As Sir Roger admitted, cases of abuse will never be eliminated. “Every now and then something inexplicable happens that will defy our best attempts to understand and explain it.”

Precisely. The same could be said about turning the entire country into a nation of suspects.

SOURCE



Some British parents want no school discipline at all

A school which puts unruly pupils in a store room is facing a backlash from furious parents who are planning a protest. Disruptive children are sent to the 8ft by 4ft room, which has no handles on the inside and only a window in the door, until they calm down. But mothers and fathers have compared the punishment to 'something from the dark ages' and are threatening to keep their children out of classes and picket the main gate until the school changes its policy.

Coppins Green Primary School in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, has refused to back down, however, saying it is necessary to control 'extreme, disturbed children in a safe way'. Mother of three Michelle Evans, 37, has had her daughter Rebecca, nine, locked in the room three times last week after being disruptive in class. She said: 'There is no window to the outside world, there is just a window in the door. 'There is no handle on the inside, the door opens inwards. What if a child is asthmatic or epileptic and has a fit and falls against the door? 'It is like something from the dark ages. I don't want to send my child to a concentration camp.' She added: 'My daughter's claustrophobic and hates confined spaces. It's awful.'

Another parent, Sarah Powell, 33, who has two daughters at the school, said: 'There's supposed to be a teacher on the outside of the room and they hold the child in until they calm down. 'But it can be terrifying for a child and it is going to make a child more upset.'

About 50 parents are expected to protest at the school gates on Monday and organisers claim up to 120 children will be kept away from classes. Many are also angry about a rewards system based on attendance, punctuality, behaviour and dress code which blocks some children from going on school trips.

Schools across the UK have been adopting forms of isolation as a punishment for unruly behaviour among pupils. Parents of children at Ridgewood School in Doncaster last year complained about a black booth lit by a spotlight, dubbing it 'Guantanamo Bay'. The school defended the system, saying time spent in the punishment room gave pupils time to reflect on their bad behaviour. Morley High School in Leeds brought in booths where pupils do work under the supervisions of teachers as part of a 'positive discipline' scheme.

A 2006 study of school isolation techniques for Investing In Children, an organisation which promotes the rights of young people, argued they did not work. The report concluded: 'Isolation has a bad effect on young people's physical and mental health. It makes people feel inadequate; it can take away their confidence and self-esteem.'

The room at Coppins Green School - a mixed establishment with around 650 pupils aged three to 11 - is watched over by a specially trained member of staff. There is no lock, but the door is held closed by the member of staff on the outside and there is no handle on the inside. However, the room has been designed so that the door will swing open if the adult is called away, allowing the child to leave. An Ofsted inspection earlier this year classed the school as 'satisfactory', the third lowest of four categories, but said behaviour was 'of a high standard'.

Head teacher Stuart Livingstone admitted the isolation techniques were controversial but insisted they benefited students. 'It is not a punishment at all. It is a safe room where adults can control an extreme, disturbed child in a safe way,' he said. 'It is not something we use automatically. It really isn't used often, except in extreme cases. It is a small room, not a cupboard, but it is all we can find.'

Mr Livingstone added: 'Coppins Green Primary School has an extremely sophisticated pastoral care system in place which is implemented by a highly qualified team of staff. 'There is a reward system in place at the school which is based on how children themselves choose to behave, which many of the children thrive on. 'Very occasionally we have to deal with extremely violent and disruptive behaviour in order to safeguard and protect other pupils and staff at the school.

'There are a number of safe places at the school to calm children down including a family room with sofas and in very extreme cases a smaller safe room for the most disruptive and violent children. 'Any child that is placed in the room is fully supervised by one of more qualified members of staff and parents are informed. 'We take the welfare of all children very seriously and strive to provide and safe, caring and nurturing environment.'

SOURCE



Curry spice 'kills cancer cells'

It has also been claimed as a slimming agent

An extract found in the bright yellow curry spice turmeric can kill off cancer cells, scientists have shown. The chemical - curcumin - has long been thought to have healing powers and is already being tested as a treatment for arthritis and even dementia. Now tests by a team at the Cork Cancer Research Centre show it can destroy gullet cancer cells in the lab.

Cancer experts said the findings in the British Journal of Cancer could help doctors find new treatments. Dr Sharon McKenna and her team found that curcumin started to kill cancer cells within 24 hours. The cells also began to digest themselves, after the curcumin triggered lethal cell death signals. Dr McKenna said: "Scientists have known for a long time that natural compounds have the potential to treat faulty cells that have become cancerous and we suspected that curcumin might have therapeutic value."

Dr Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK, said: "This is interesting research which opens up the possibility that natural chemicals found in turmeric could be developed into new treatments for oesophageal cancer. "Rates of oesophageal cancer have gone up by more than a half since the 70s and this is thought to be linked to rising rates of obesity, alcohol intake and reflux disease so finding ways to prevent this disease is important too."

Each year around 7,800 people are diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in the UK. It is the sixth most common cause of cancer death and accounts for around five percent of all UK cancer deaths.

SOURCE



British Labour Party censored links between immigration and crime in report

Labour censored a hugely controversial report on immigration to remove details of its possible links to organised crime, street fights and begging, it emerged last night. The revelation prompted claims by Opposition MPs that the Government's handling of the Cabinet Office study was 'fast turning into the most scandalous political cover up in recent time'.

Ministers have come under fire over comments made by ex-Government advisor Andrew Neather, who claimed that early drafts of the report said mass immigration would make Britain more multicultural and enable Labour to portray the Tories as racists. Critics said it blew the lid off a 'secret Labour plot' to use mass immigration for political gain.

But yesterday the row took a twist when it emerged that key passages which may have harmed the case for Britain adopting an open-door immigration policy had also been airbrushed from the report. They included a section headed 'criminal behaviour', which warned of possible links between mass immigration and some crimes. The passages were allegedly removed when the report was being finalised in 2000 by the Cabinet Office's Performance and Innovation Unit, which has been described as a Blairite 'think tank' operating at the heart of Whitehall.

One of the sections missing from the final report, which was published in 2001, said: 'There is emerging evidence that the circumstances in which asylum seekers are living is leading to criminal offences, including fights and begging.' A second section warned: 'Migration has opened up new opportunities for organised crime.'

It stressed that migrants were not more likely to be criminals, despite more foreign nationals ending up in prison. The prison figures were down to foreign visitors being held at airports and ports for drug smuggling, and did not relate to migrants looking to settle in the UK, the report said. But Downing Street allegedly removed the section because it was 'nervous' about how it would be received. Other crimes linked to migration included 'marriage rackets', drug and people trafficking and fraud.

Another passage proposing a cross-government communications strategy on migration to inspire a more positive public attitude was also pulled.

The draft, leaked to London's Evening Standard, also claimed that racism towards black migrants had come 'not just from extremists or working class communities, but from politicians and policy-makers at the highest level'. This was not included in the final report.

Last night, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: 'This is fast turning into the most scandalous political cover up in recent time. Ministers are clearly in a state of complete denial about what appears to have happened.'

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, said: 'This is clear evidence of what many have long suspected, namely that the Government whitewashed many aspects of immigration while making exaggerated claims about the economic value.'

The leak overshadowed attempts by ministers to come out fighting and discredit Mr Neather's account of the draft report. In a newspaper article written last Friday, the former adviser to Tony Blair claimed the Government opened up Britain's borders in part to try to humiliate Right-wing opponents of immigration. Secret passages allegedly said the policy 'was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.'

Yesterday, immigration minister Phil Woolas denied any significant decision had been taken to loosen immigration controls. He added: 'The biggest reason for illegal immigration into the United Kingdom was not as Mr Neather said, it was the abandonment in 1994 by the John Major Government of border controls. 'I find Mr Neather's statements not credible, not stood up by the truth and the civil servant to whom he has referred has as I understand refuted these accusations.' 'The reason we have had increasing immigration under the Labour Government is Eastern European immigration and they have started to go home.'

Mr Woolas also claimed that Gordon Brown was tougher on migrants than Tony Blair, saying: 'This Prime Minister has a much more robust attitude to migration than the previous prime minister, and the changes we have been implementing have come straight from Gordon Brown.'

But shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green said: 'Mr Woolas is clearly in denial about his own Government's immigration policy. David Blunkett, as home secretary, said there was "no obvious upper limit" to immigration, and his policy reflected that. 'It would be more honest for ministers to admit they made a huge mistake and introduce new policies, such as the limit on work permits a Conservative Government would introduce.'

Tory leader David Cameron, speaking at his regular Westminster press conference, restated a pledge to return net immigration levels to those of the Major and Thatcher years. Figures of more than 200,000 recorded in recent years, he said, are 'too high'.

Last night the Cabinet Office denied the author of the PIU report, Jonathan Portes, had been pressurised by ministers. A spokesman said: 'We are confident that the principles of the code were applied in this case, and the lead author, a civil servant of some twenty years standing, is clear that he was under no political pressure at any point in the process.' He also denied Mr Portes, now a senior economic adviser to the Government, had ever worked as a speechwriter for Mr Brown.

WHAT THEY CUT OUT

* 'Migration has opened up new opportunities for organised crime.

* 'Data is necessarily tentative, but it is estimated that the global profit from trafficking illegal migrants is $5-7billion.

* 'We have no data on trafficking to the UK (the Home Office estimates 'thousands') but examples from abroad are illustrative.

* 'Some 750,000 migrants from the former U.S.SR entered Israel in the 90s and £2-5billion of Russian organised crime money is estimated by police to have been invested in Israel between 1991 and 1998.

* 'The illegal migration of 600,000 Fukienese Chinese to the U.S. yielded an estimated $3.2billion profit to the criminal gangs and was followed by 'institutionalised Fukienese crime with its services and predation'.

* 'In New Zealand, however, a study of Asian immigrants found lower levels of offending than for the resident population.'

Source



BBC censors a joke

But lots of foul language is allowed

"Its irreverent take on the week's best political stories rarely raises an eyebrow outside the Westminster village. But BBC1 show This Week threw bosses into a panic yesterday after host Andrew Neil light-heartedly compared [black] MP Diane Abbott to a chocolate HobNob biscuit.

Corporation chiefs, terrified of a race backlash, immediately removed all trace of the episode from its websites and iPlayer on-demand service following 15 complaints from viewers.

But the move has infuriated licence fee payers, many of whom have flooded message boards demanding to know why the programme has been taken off the site earlier than usual.

Last night, politicians and lobby groups accused the BBC of being ' institutionally politically correct' and ' paranoid'. Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe said: 'The BBC are totally paranoid about some things and utterly dismissive of other incidents. 'I only wish that they would take such a hard line against swearing, rather than things like this.'

The episode - which was broadcast immediately after BNP leader Nick Griffin's controversial appearance on Question Time last Thursday - opened with Neil joking about Gordon Brown's favourite biscuit with co-hosts Miss Abbott and Michael Portillo.... Neil went on to compare the panelists as types of biscuit, saying: 'Here we have our very own chocolate HobNob and custard cream - Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo.'

MP John Whittingdale, chair of the media select committee, said the corporation had 'completely overreacted' and called for the missing show to be reinstated online. 'Nobody could seriously believe calling Diane Abbott a chocolate HobNob and Michael Portillo a custard cream to be racist,' he added.

Vivienne Pattison, director of lobby group Mediawatch, said: 'There was also the offensive remarks made about the Queen on Mock The Week recently, which was much worse but was allowed to go out.

Source

British defence chiefs blamed for leaky aircraft that crashed: "The Ministry of Defence and Britain’s largest defence company were officially blamed yesterday for the deaths of 14 servicemen who were killed when an RAF Nimrod surveillance aircraft burst into flames over Afghanistan three years ago. In one of the most damning official reports published, the MoD was accused of sacrificing the safety of members of the Armed Forces to cut costs. The ministry was guilty of a “systemic breach of the military covenant” between the nation and the men and women of the Forces, the report said. “Airworthiness was a casualty of the process of cuts, change, dilution and distraction,” Charles Haddon-Cave, QC, concluded after a 20-month review of the background to the disaster on September 2, 2006, which represented the single biggest loss of life of service personnel in one incident since the Falklands conflict in 1982... There had been signs before the disaster that the Nimrod MR2, of which aircraft XV230 was one, had design faults, notably the juxtaposition of fuel pipes with hot-air ducts which presented a “catastrophic fire risk”."





29 October, 2009

Simplistic thinking in politics and the ad hominem fallacy

Sad to say, in politics logical thinking seems to come a poor second to emotional appeals -- and we see a pernicious example of that below.

Historical revisionism is found among both Leftists and nationalists, though it is far and away most prevalent on the Left. Some surveys have shown, for instance, that a majority of U.S. Democrat voters are "truthers": People who believe that it was George Bush who blew up the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. And the chronic Leftist denial of the horrors of Communism is legendary.

Compared to that, the skepticism about the Holocaust seen among some nationalists is small beer but the Left-dominated media seek out such views like sniffer dogs and make a huge deal about any of it that they find. So one skeptical word about the holocaust serves to stigmatize someone for life, even if it was a passing phase or an incidental element in the evolution of that person's thinking.

The prime example of that at the moment is of course Nick Griffin of the anti-immigration British National Party. And the fact that he is a staunch friend of Israel is not allowed to excuse him. So the Jewish writer below is right to say that support for Israel from nationalists is an embarrassment. But it is only an embarrassment because of the simplistic thinking of Leftists in the media and politics -- who with kneejerk predictability resort to the ad hominem fallacy (The fallacy that a statement is wrong because of who said it). So if Griffin supports Israel, support for Israel must be wrong: Quite incredible stupidity but staple fare for the Left.

In politics Over the past few weeks, the Jewish state has been publicly endorsed by two particularly controversial members of the far right.

Firstly, Nick Griffin, leader of the racist British National Party, which currently accepts only white people as members, declared that his was the only party to support Israel in its "war against terrorists" during Operation Cast Lead.

While Griffin, who was elected in June to the European Parliament, is not usually paid much attention, this time was different. He was speaking on Britain's most prestigious political television program, BBC's Question Time. The decision to invite him had proven so controversial that 8 million viewers tuned in, compared with the program's usual 2 to 3 million. The entire country was hanging on his every word.

Just three weeks earlier, the Conservative Party — now widely expected to win the next election — was embroiled in a national row over its alliance with another European member of parliament, Poland's Michal Kaminski.

Kaminski, who leads an important rightist bloc, has been disliked in Jewish circles since he declared in 2001 that the Poles should not apologise for the massacre of Jews by Polish residents of Jedwabne in 1941, unless "the whole Jewish nation [apologises] for what some Jewish Communists did in eastern Poland". There were also concerns that he had worn the Chrobry Sword, a symbol of the Catholic ultra-right in Poland and that he still maintained these unsavory connections.

So when, in early October, he appeared at the Conservative Party's annual conference, the main Jewish representative body – the archaically named Board of Deputies – wrote to Conservative leader David Cameron asking for reassurances. Labour's foreign minister, David Miliband, went on the attack and the ensuing media row, which is still ongoing – the Conservatives were forced to recently reassure Hillary Clinton on the subject — tarnished what should have been Cameron's moment of triumph.

But it did not go unnoticed that Kaminski was in Britain as the special guest of the Conservative Friends of Israel — who had also taken him, this summer, to Israel, where he was pictured smiling by the Western Wall and was welcomed by deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon. Kaminski, it emerged, was considered a staunch friend of Israel in Brussels, where he regularly spoke up for its right to self-defence...

But for Israel, this is a disaster. From now on, anyone in Britain supporting Israel publicly can be expected to be told they are holding a position only the racist BNP, or the likes of Kaminski, holds. It will many years to shake off these associations.

More HERE

The race and IQ debate on Britain's Channel 4 TV

Britain's Left-leaning "Daily Mirror" had a laconic summary of the matter but of greater interest was a particularly well-informed comment from one of its readers, which I reproduce below, with his links made clickable. I then close with a most amusing comment from Britain's "Greenest" (and faltering) newspaper, the inaptly-named "Independent":

1. I have little faith that this show would have provided an objective take on things as it relied on the Lewontin Fallacy (more within group gene variation than between group variation). This was debunked in 2003 by Cambridge geneticist AWF Edwards. The problem is that it overlooks the correlations and that genes vary in frequency across groups.

2. Efforts to tar IQ tests with bad things in history overlook the fact that Stalin and Hitler banned IQ testing. In Hitler's case he banned them because Jews did well on them.

3. IQ tests actually have a progressive background in allowing working class kids with academic ability to get into Colleges previously only for the rich. See here

4. Tests aren't perfect but they predict academic performance very well. More recently neuroscientists have identified that people have quite distinct brain characteristics which correlate with iq test performance. These include cortical thickness, myelination quality and efficiency in processing info.

UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson & Yale Psychologist Jeremy Gray summarize these findings here.

5. These traits are significantly heritable.

"The UCLA researchers took the study a step further by comparing the white matter architecture of identical twins, who share almost all their DNA, and fraternal twins, who share only half. Results showed that the quality of the white matter is highly genetically determined, although the influence of genetics varies by brain area. According to the findings, about 85 percent of the variation in white matter in the parietal lobe, which is involved in mathematics, logic, and visual-spatial skills, can be attributed to genetics. But only about 45 percent of the variation in the temporal lobe, which plays a central role in learning and memory, appears to be inherited.

Thompson and his collaborators also analyzed the twins' DNA, and they are now looking for specific genetic variations that are linked to the quality of the brain's white matter. The researchers have already found a candidate--the gene for a protein called BDNF, which promotes cell growth. "People with one variation have more intact fibers," says Thompson."

Source for the above quote

6. Many genes have undergone significant change over the past 10,000 years so the possibility that groups would differ to some extent on average is not implausible.

"Dec. 10, 2007 - Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up - and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought - indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.

"We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago," says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

Harpending says there are provocative implications from the study, published online Monday, Dec. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: "We aren't the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago," he says, which may explain, for example, part of the difference between Viking invaders and their peaceful Swedish descendants. "The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any Temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence."

"Human races are evolving away from each other," Harpending says. "Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity." He says that is happening because humans dispersed from Africa to other regions 40,000 years ago, "and there has not been much flow of genes between the regions since then."

Source for the above quote

Now for a gem from "The Independent", below:

It is an abhorrent notion yet with some scientific credibility. James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, has expressed gloom about the future of Africa on the basis that "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really". There are plenty of other illustrious scientists who support the view that there is a kind of global league table of intelligence, apparently with the Australian Aborigine at the bottom, and Omaar talked to several of them. But he found that their assertions are largely based on IQ tests that militate against the developing world, taking no heed of "wisdom, social intelligence and creativity". Moreover, in South Africa, where educational opportunities are no longer determined by race, such ideas are increasingly confounded.

SOURCE

Even by Green/Left standards, the implication that war-torn, dirt-poor and half-starving Africa is a powerhouse of "wisdom, social intelligence and creativity" is seriously deranged. Sadly for the wittingly-blind Left, "wisdom, social intelligence and creativity" is mostly to be found among the high IQ populations of European and East Asian origin -- JR



British prosecutors on the side of the thieves again

A man who stabbed a burglar to death after catching him in the act was charged with murder yesterday. Omari Roberts, 23, was remanded in custody. Roberts had found two teenage burglars in his mother's house when he arrived to visit her. After chasing one of the youths, aged 14, from the property, he returned to find 17-year-old Tyler Juett still there. There was a struggle and Juett was fatally stabbed in the chest, Nottingham Magistrates Court was told.

The Crown Prosecution Service said the decision to charge Roberts months after the incident in March had been taken after 'careful consideration'. Its lawyers believed he had used 'excessive and gratuitous force'.

The case echoes that of Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, who became a cause celebre when he was jailed for life for murder in 2000 after shooting dead a teenage intruder at his dilapidated Norfolk home. His conviction was reduced to manslaughter on appeal and he was released in 2003.

Yesterday the court heard that Roberts's mother Jacqueline McKenzie-Johnson, 46, a senior official at Nottingham City Council, was not at home when her son arrived on the afternoon of March 13.

Lee Shepherd, prosecuting, said Roberts first discovered the 14-year-old, who was also stabbed during a confrontation. Roberts chased him down the street before returning to the semi-detached house in Old Basford, Nottingham, to be confronted by Juett.

Applying for bail for Roberts, who is also charged with wounding the younger raider with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, Raj Chand, defending, said: 'This must have been a dreadful situation for any law-abiding member of the public. 'Someone said to me earlier that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I said that he was in the right place at the right time. An Englishman's home is his castle. 'He says he was in the right. He regrets what happened, but he was defending himself and his property.'

District Judge John Stobart initially said he would take the 'rare decision' to grant bail because of Roberts's flawless record of reporting to police. But he agreed to remand him in custody at least until today after the prosecution said it wanted to appeal against the decision. Roberts, who did not enter any pleas, is scheduled to appear at Nottingham Crown Court on November 10. His address was listed in court as his mother's house, although it is understood he did not live there at the time of the incident.

Before the hearing, CPS lawyer Ian Cunningham said: 'I have decided that when Omari Roberts disturbed two burglars and caused injuries to them - in one case fatally - his actions were not reasonable. 'I have looked very carefully at the public interest in this case, and I am satisfied that it requires a prosecution. 'I also discussed the case with the CPS principal legal adviser and have decided there is sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.' Mr Cunningham said legal guidelines made clear that anyone using 'reasonable force' to defend themselves would enjoy the full protection of the law. He added: 'The law also makes clear that people could be prosecuted if they act with excessive and gratuitous force.' [That guy sounds like what Americans call a Monday morning quarterback]

• Nottinghamshire Police said the 14-year-old admitted burglary at youth court in May and was sentenced to two years' detention.

SOURCE



Judges sink British government's 'obnoxious' plan to tell juries what to decide

Former judges, including a retired law lord, have helped sink Government plans to stop men using a wife's infidelity as a partial defence for murdering her. Harriet Harman had wanted to change the law to stop men potentially escaping with a charge of manslaughter if their wife was having an affair. The Equalities Minister, Labour's deputy leader, claimed the change would end the 'culture of excuses' among men who kill.

But the move was described as 'astonishing' and 'obnoxious' in the Lords yesterday as peers rejected an amendment in the Coroners and Justice Bill by 99 votes to 84. It would have prevented a jury from considering whether sexual infidelity led to a 'loss of self-control'.

Lord Thomas of Gresford, a deputy high court judge, described the exemption of sexual infidelity as 'illogical' and 'outstandingly obnoxious'. He told peers it reflected 'something that has run through the 12 years of this Government, and that is a refusal to trust the good common sense of the British jury.'

Retired law lord Lord Lloyd of Berwick said: 'It is little short of astonishing that Parliament should be asked to tell a jury whether sexual infidelity is enough to cause a man or woman to lose their self-control'.

Crossbencher Lord Neill of Bladen, a retired judge, said: 'We will make ourselves look extraordinarily foolish if we say a jury cannot take account of what most people recognise as being the most dominant cause of violence by one individual against another. 'Every opera you go to, every novel you read, has sexual infidelity at some point or other - otherwise they are not worth reading or listening to.'

For the Government, Lord Bach said ministers understood that 'passions may run very high' due to sexual infidelity. But he added: 'What we cannot concede is the suggestion that it is acceptable to deal with some situations by resorting to violence - and not just violence but the deliberate use of such force that death results.'

The vote was a stinging rebuke for Miss Harman, who has led a campaign to stop men 'getting away with murder'. Unveiling the proposal, the Equalities Minister had declared: 'For centuries the law has allowed men to escape a murder charge in homicide cases by blaming the victim. 'Ending the provocation defence in cases of "infidelity" is an important law change and will end the culture of excuses.'

The defence is open to both men and women, but ministers say it is overwhelmingly used by men.

Miss Harman is likely to push for the vote to be overturned when the Bill reaches the Commons, but the legislation contains many measures which ministers would not want to lose in a row with peers.

Tory justice spokesman Dominic Grieve said last night: 'There is no justification for preventing juries from deciding for themselves whether sexual infidelity may or may not be grounds for reducing a charge of murder to manslaughter. 'This government proposal was always about political correctness and posturing rather than sound criminal justice. Its defeat is a victory for common sense.'

A second controversial change to the law is likely to go ahead, however. It will allow women who kill abusive partners in cold blood to escape a murder conviction if they prove they feared more violence. They must establish only that they were responding to a 'slow burn' of abuse. The change would sweep aside the existing requirement in any defence of provocation that they killed on the spur of the moment after a 'sudden' loss of control.

The Ministry of Justice said of the Lords vote: 'The Government wants to make it clear once and for all, and in statute, that it is unacceptable to kill another person and then claim a partial defence to murder on the grounds of sexual infidelity.' It added: 'The history of the partial-defence of provocation has led to a commonly-held belief that this is a defence which can be abused by men who kill their wives out of sexual jealousy and revenge over infidelity. 'This erodes the confidence of the public in the fairness of the criminal justice system. 'The Government is disappointed by the vote and will reflect carefully before deciding how to proceed.'

SOURCE



The growing rate of open-door migration into Britain: Number of new arrivals has surged by 50% under Labour

The rate at which foreigners are swelling the population has increased by 50 per cent since a secret Government immigration policy document was written. Critics said it was clear evidence that ministers had implemented the controversial Cabinet Office report. This allegedly claimed mass immigration would make Britain more multicultural and allow Labour to portray the Tories as racists.

Speaking in the Commons yesterday, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said it would be 'utterly disgraceful' for ministers to base immigration policy on party politics. He asked Immigration Minister Phil Woolas: 'Can I invite you to put the record straight - what was the motivation behind the very rapid increase in immigration under this Government?'. Incredibly, Mr Woolas did not appear to know which report Mr Grayling was referring to - despite the widespread coverage it received over the weekend.

Yesterday, the Daily Mail told how ministers were facing calls for an inquiry into claims by former Labour adviser Andrew Neather that the Government opened up Britain's borders in part to try to humiliate Right-wing opponents of immigration.

His allegations referred to a 2001 report from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a think-tank based in the Cabinet Office, which made the case for mass immigration. Earlier drafts are said to have included the statement of 'a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural'.

Now an analysis of officials statistics has found that - from the date the report was published - the number of foreign nationals being allowed into the UK surged. Whitehall statistics show that in the year of the document's publication, 370,000 non-British nationals arrived. That rose to 416,000 the following year and, by 2006, had reached 510,000. In 2007, it fell back slightly to 502,000 - but this was still an increase of 30 per cent on 2001.

For net foreign immigration - the number of non-British citizens arriving, versus the number leaving - the figures are more dramatic. In 2001, it stood at 221,000 - but by 2007 it had reached 333,000 - up by 50 per cent. This is the size of the increase in the foreign-born population of the UK.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think-tank, said: 'Now it has been revealed that mass immigration under this government was a deliberate policy concealed from the public, and especially from the white working class whose lives and neighbourhoods have been most affected. Now immigration will add another seven million to our population over the next 25 years unless really serious measures are taken to cut immigration by at least 75 per cent.'

Opponents claim Labour's bungling of immigration policy has contributed to the growth of the BNP.

Mr Neather, who worked for Tony Blair and Jack Straw, said Labour's relaxation of immigration controls was a attempt to engineer a 'truly multicultural' country and plug gaps in the jobs market. He claimed the 2001 policy paper inspired the 'major shift' in immigration policy.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw, who was then Home Secretary, has dismissed Mr Neather's claims as ' complete rubbish'.

SOURCE





British doctors engaged in ‘slow euthanasia’ for patients with terminal illnesses

Patients with terminal illness are being heavily sedated by doctors before their deaths in a form of “slow euthanasia”, research suggests. A poll of nearly 3,000 doctors found that almost one in five had administered infusions of drugs to keep patients unconscious for hours or days at a time.

In appropriate doses, sedatives and strong painkillers are considered a valuable way of easing the pain and anxiety of patients who are dying with conditions such as cancer. But 18.7 per cent of British doctors polled said they used drugs to invoke “continuous deep sedation” in a dying patient, a practice which in other countries is seen as an alternative to legalised euthanasia.

GPs and hospital doctors who are not palliative care specialists were more likely to report using high doses of sedatives or painkillers to keep patients asleep, leading to calls for all doctors to have mandatory training in the care of dying patients. Guidelines for care at the end of life emphasise that doctors should always act in a patient’s best interests and act within the law, which prohibits euthanasia or actively helping someone to die.

The study, published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, also found that of the sample of 2,786 doctors, those who strongly supported the legalisation of assisted suicide were nearly 40 per cent more likely to employ continued deep sedation than the average. By contrast, doctors who reported strong religious beliefs or who actively opposed changing the law were less likely to report sedating patients before death.

In most cases sedation was used for between one and seven days or less than 24 hours. But in a significant minority of patients — 8 per cent — doctors reported sedating patients for more than a week before they died.

Clive Seale, a professor of medical sociology who led the study at Queen Mary, University of London, said that deliberately keeping patients unconscious until death was controversial, with some physicians viewing it as a form of “slow euthanasia”. “Sedation in itself not directly kill a patient, but it does put them to sleep and is associated with other things such as the withdrawal of fluids and ventilation,” he added. “In this country it can be seen as a form of treatment to relieve intractable suffering but in the Netherlands and Belgium, doctors also see it as an easier alternative to legalised euthanasia.”

Most doctors who sedated patients reported using midazolam, a drug which in high, continuous doses can cause loss of consciousness and memory loss. But nearly a quarter of those surveyed also reported using only opiate painkillers such as morphine or medical forms of heroin to sedate patients, which experts said suggested they misunderstood the effects of the drugs.

Rob George, of the Association for Palliative Medicine, said that rather than deliberately acting to bring on a patient’s death, some doctors may be misreporting the effect of the drugs. “Some doctors who are not specialists may be confused and incompetent in using these drugs but the study suggests they are misunderstanding what they are doing as well. "Dying patients are more likely to be drowsy or asleep in their final days and doctors might assume wrongly that this is a result of medication. “It does not mean that they are hastening a patient’s death. But we do have ample evidence that many doctors do not know what they are doing when it comes to palliative care, and whether or not [dying patients] get good control of their pain and symptoms is a lottery.”

The National Council for Palliative Care, which funded the study with medical charities, estimates that 300,000 people die each year without getting the specialist care and pain management they need. Simon Chapman, director of policy at the council, said that sedation was recognised as an appropriate part of end of life care for some patients.

An official for the Patients Association said: “There is no doubt that the vast majority of patients’ families who contact us after a death do so because they are haunted forever by watching their loved one not have the necessary care, including sedation. “It is imperative that everyone considers making a living will to make your views about end of life care clear and understood. “At the moment you have more training in pain relief as a vet than a doctor.”

SOURCE




Half of British doctors 'too busy using computers to look patients in the eye'

America's got some great things to look forward to under Obamacare!

Nearly half of GPs claim they are too busy to look patients in the eye during consultations, according to a shocking poll out today. A survey of family doctors found that 38 per cent are unable to give patients enough eye contact because they are spending so much time tapping information into their computers to meet Government targets. They say a third of their time with patients is spent on paperwork or data inputs - meaning there is less time to listen to patients.

Although the average length of consultations has increased in recent years, GPs are now working an average of seven hours a week less since a lucrative new contract negotiated in 2003.

The study also showed that half of GPs say their primary care trust did not actively support their practice in offering high-quality patient care, and 27 per cent said they were ‘actively obstructive’.

Last night critics said doctors would be able to spend more time with patients if they worked a bit longer.

The survey of 600 GPs in Pulse magazine found the computer-based work - such as the recording of data to meet Government targets - has left doctors struggling to deliver patients' personal care. Much of the information they are forced to input leads to bonus payments under the performance-related part of their contract.

The poll found that 38 per cent of GPs said they were unable to give patients enough eye contract during consultations. They said that just over half of each consultation - 55 per cent - is now spent speaking to patients and addressing their needs, while a third is spent on paperwork and data input.

Almost all - 97 per cent - said consultations had become more complex and intense over the past five years, with three quarters saying complexity had 'greatly increased'. Although the length of consultants has been increased to an average of 11 minutes, the GPs surveyed said they really needed 14 minutes to give the best service to their patients.

Dr Robert Baker, a GP in Swanage, Dorset, told Pulse that the bureaucratic burden was affecting the doctor-patient relationship. 'I could do with being split in two to manage prevention and curative aspects; both of which I am expected to address, for multiple systems, in 10 minutes,' he said. 'The demands of the patient's agenda, the Government's agenda and the requirement that everything I hear, say and do must be meticulously recorded make for an extremely crowded consultation.’

But Vanessa Bourne, of the Patients Association, said: 'GPs are the gatekeepers to all other healthcare. Patients must be able to trust that an accurate diagnosis is being made. At the very least that means having a proper look at the patient. 'If PCTs are to blame for the wrong priorities in a consultation, then patients risk being shortchanged twice over - once by their GP and again by the PCT. ‘For over a quarter of GPs to feel that their PCT is being “actively obstructive" tells patients that urgent action is needed.’

Richard Hoey, editor of Pulse, said: 'GPs' consultations with patients may have got a little longer, but they've failed to keep pace with the steep rise in computer work and the growing complexity of cases, as patients are managed in the community rather than in hospital. 'With 101 things to squeeze into a consultation, it's the personal elements that are being squeezed out - and that includes the real basics such as making eye contact with the patient.'

SOURCE



Leftist bigots in one-fifth of British primary schools 'refusing to lay on help for brightest children'

One in five primary schools are rejecting Government demands to identify their brightest pupils because teachers have "philosophical issues" with giving extra support to the most able children, a senior civil servant said. Teachers have been warned that they are breaking the law by refusing to nominate pupils for the so-called Gifted and Talented scheme.

The programme obliges schools to put on extra activities to stretch the top five to 10 per cent of their students. It was introduced in 1999 to encourage the parents of the most intelligent children to remain in the state sector. But a fifth of schools are still refusing to register suitable pupils because of ideological objections, according to Tim Dracup, who the runs the scheme at the Department for Children, Schools and Families. "It seems many have philosophical issues with the label 'gifted and talented', but the census is statutory and if they are not filling it in, then they are acting illegally."

"The guidance doesn't give anyone the opportunity to say, 'There's nobody we can identify here,' because it's relative to their group of children. We want all schools to put down a marker and give extra challenge and support."

In January a Government report found deep-rooted objections to the Gifted and Talented scheme at a significant number of schools, despite previous warnings from ministers that teachers are legally obliged to co-operate.

Nominated pupils should be given access to after-school classes and weekend tuition, to ensure they are challenged. Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said it was "absolutely scandalous" that some primary school teachers were damaging the prospects of intelligent children by refusing to lay on additional help. "It is vital to the young people themselves and to the future of the country that the brightest children are given the best possible support," he said. "Too many teachers think high achievement is elitist and they have ideological objections to any kind of education that isn't egalitarian."

He warned that the reluctance of teachers in the state sector to go out of their way to help able pupils would increase support for grammar schools and lead to the most talented pupils being moved into private education.

The Gifted and Talented scheme has a higher uptake at secondary level, with around 95 per cent of schools nominating pupils.

SOURCE




British teacher's relief after child cruelty case thrown out

A teacher has described the “horrible” ordeal after she was accused of banging a six-year-old pupil's hand on a desk in a temper and taken to court.

Halina Glebocki, 26, said she had been through a traumatic four months and had “not had a night’s sleep in four months”. She said: "It's been the worst experience of my life. I've barely slept since it all started. When I found out I was being prosecuted, I was just in a total state of shock and disbelief. "When everyone around you knows your character and your level of professionalism, for it to have been taken so far is beyond comprehension."

Miss Glebocki was arrested in June after a “spurious allegation” was made that she had banged a child’s hand against a desk, causing bruising, while supervising an extra reading lesson for a small group of children at St Thomas of Canterbury RC Primary School in Walsall, West Mids.

She denied an allegation of child cruelty and at her first appearance before magistrates in the town requested the case ben sent to Crown Court. However, when the case called again at Walsall magistrates for committal on Wednesday, the bench ruled that lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service had taken too long to gather their evidence. Refusing a request from them for more time, they discharged the case.

Miss Glebocki, from Hednesford, West Mids, has since left the school while the charge was hanging over her. A teacher for three years, she said she had an unblemished record, but said that the ongoing court case had cost her a job abroad. She said: "I was due to take a teaching job in Thailand, but this whole thing has stopped me pursuing my career and living my life. "I just can't understand how one person's spurious allegation can lead to something like this. It's just been horrible. "I've always had it at the back of my mind. “I had to attend the police station every week and every week they just told me to go away and come back again the following week. “I have never been so tired in my life due to the lack of sleep.”

However, she added that her experience had not put her off the profession. "I just want to get back to teaching," she said. "It's a real relief and I just want to put it all behind me."

SOURCE



Prince Philip still likes a joke



We read:

"Britain's Prince Philip has reportedly made one of his notorious gaffes by joking with a British-Indian business leader about his name, a newspaper said.

During a reception at Buckingham Palace for some 400 influential British Indians, the husband of the Queen greeted Atul Patel by glancing at his name tag and saying: "There's a lot of your family in tonight."

According to The Sun newspaper, the comment appeared to suggest that all Patels are related. Patel is a common Indian surname, and there are an estimated 670,000 Patels living in Britain, the tabloid said.

A spokesman for Patel, who is chief executive of leading housing association the LHA-Asra group, said no offence was taken by the remark. "Absolutely no offence was taken at all by Atul. It was taken in a very light hearted way," the spokesman told the newspaper....

The prince's comment was condemned by Republic, a group campaigning to abolish the monarchy, as "deeply embarrassing"...

The 88-year-old prince is well known for undiplomatic off-hand remarks, which have included:

- "Still throwing spears?" (a question to an Australian Aborigine during a 2002 visit)

- "You managed not to get eaten, then?" (to a student who had been trekking in Papua New Guinea, 1998).

Source

"Patel" means landlord, which is why it is common.





28 October, 2009

How British police are making criminals of the over-40s: Target culture fuels rise in first-time convictions for middle aged

Record numbers of middle-aged people are being ‘criminalised’ by target-chasing police. The number of over-40s receiving a first conviction or caution has increased by half since 2001. It is now running at a startling 65 a day, according to new Government figures. After decades of abiding by the law, people are being punished for crimes such as motoring offences or refusing to pay wheelie-bin fines.

Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said they were being pursued so police could meet the targets imposed by Labour. These give the same weight to catching a speeding motorist as to snaring a rapist or paedophile. Mr Huhne said last night: ‘Labour have criminalised a generation and treated tens of thousands of law-abiding middle-aged and elderly citizens like villains.’

Parliamentary answers show the number of first-time entrants to the criminal justice system who are over 50 increased by 46.3 per cent between 2000/01 and 2007/08, from 16,400 to 24,000. In the 40-49 age group, the leap was 57.4 per cent, with 32,900 previously law-abiding people being criminalised. The increases in the middle-aged groups far outstripped the general picture. In the population as a whole, there was a rise of just 18.6 per cent.

The figures reflect the fact that many of Labour’s new spot fines for ‘crimes’ such as overfilling a wheelie bin are aimed at householders. These are more likely than the general population to be middle-aged.

A first-time entrant is someone receiving their first court conviction or caution, as recorded on the police national computer. Motoring offences, including things like not wearing a seatbelt, make up half the cases dealt with by the courts. Drivers who challenge a speed camera ticket must go to court and will account for many of the punishments. Refusing to accept a wheelie-bin fine can also lead to court.

Mr Huhne, who obtained the figures, said: ‘The soaring number of people being criminalised is a direct result of Labour’s target-driven, box-ticking approach to policing. ‘This Government has created a new crime for every day in office. ‘When motoring offences and rubbish-bin misdemeanours are worth the same as convictions for murder or rape, it is easy to see how we have slipped into mass criminalisation.’

Criminologist Dr David Green, of the Civitas think-tank, said the law-abiding middle-classes were being ‘deliberately targeted’ by police who had to achieve a large number of ‘sanction detections’ - solved crimes.

A recent report warned that the middle classes have lost confidence in the police. It said they have been alienated by a service which routinely targets ordinary people rather than serious criminals, simply to fill Government crime quotas. Author Harriet Sergeant said incidents which would once have been ignored are now treated as crimes. She said: ‘Complaints against the police have risen, with much of the increase coming from law-abiding, middleclass, middle-aged and retired people who no longer feel the police are on their side.’ Miss Sergeant said this was due in part to people becoming upset by the ‘rudeness and behaviour’ of officers.

A Home Office spokesman said last night: ‘We have removed all but one centrally-set target for police, to increase public confidence that the police and local councils are tackling the anti-social behaviour and crime issues that matter most locally. ‘Together with the introduction of the Policing Pledge, we have ensured that the police are no longer driven by meeting multiple national targets but by listening to the public, identifying and tackling local priorities. ‘We have already seen improvements in public confidence and know that police will continue to drive this forward.’

SOURCE



Finger on the pulse: this health and safety regulation takes the biscuit

Max Pemberton on why creating a timid, risk-averse society is a recipe for trouble

What do you think you are doing? Yes, you, the one holding that potentially lethal object. Now you’re dunking it in your tea – what in the name of rolled oats and wholemeal with a generous topping of luxurious milk chocolate do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know that, according to a report by the Department of Trade and Industry, 500 people a year are hospitalised with biscuit related injuries? There, that’s made you look at that ginger nut twice, hasn’t it?

Injuries include people falling off their chair while reaching for a biscuit, and poking themselves in the eye with one. You might think you’re one of the Jammie Dodgers who have managed to avoid such a mishap, but just wait. You may not be such a smart cookie if you are complacent about quite how dangerous biscuits can be. Some people might call this whole thing crackers, but then it would have to be pointed out that crackers are altogether a different, savoury, type of snack.

The issue has been highlighted by the British Biscuit Advisory Board (BBAB), which, according to their website, is the 'voice of British biscuits’. I wonder what British biscuits would say about all this if indeed they did have a voice? Crumbs, perhaps? Sorry, I'm going to stop the biscuit puns now.

The BBAB sent out questionnaires to council officials asking about health and safety surrounding biscuits. It was, in fact, an elaborate hoax. The board was set up by Fox’s Biscuits and was intended as a parody of the nation’s obsession with health and safety. The research that was conducted was real.

“We never thought it would be taken quite so seriously,” said Mike Driver, Fox’s marketing director. This was after hundreds of council workers completed an on-line survey into safe biscuit eating and incredibly, four councils reported having specific policies on safe biscuit consumption. One council even claimed to have supervised tea breaks for safety reasons. It is of course a risible situation but it does show the extent to which health and safety has taken over in the workplace. Our concern with risk is indelibly linked to the current litigious nature of our society and the rise in compensation claims for mishaps.

It is, perhaps, understandable therefore that organisations are keen to avoid accusations of culpability. But risk-aversion does more than just produce a stifled society that is blindly following guidelines. It is also dangerous, especially when this seeps into organisations such as the NHS. It removes the need to think and question.

Strangely, while the government has promoted evidence-based medicine within the NHS, whereby treatments and procedures are supported by clear, tangible, robust research, health and safety policies seem exempt from such scrutiny. Stories abound of trusts imposing daft regulations in order to avoid possible lawsuits, despite little or no evidence of the actual level of risk involved. But health and safety regulations can also impact on the way that clinicians work to the detriment of the patients, as well as common sense. Guidelines that were intended to ensure safe practice become monolithic and immoveable.

This has led to the situation, for example, where a surgeon friend of mine was forced to wheel patients down to the imaging department to have scans because none of the porters on duty had done the course in how to push someone in a wheelchair, so for health and safety reasons they were not allowed to. This situation was, of course, ridiculous – surely it is more of a risk to health and safety to have a surgeon leave a ward of sick people to push someone down to X-ray? And exactly how does this compare to the risk pushing someone in a wheel chair poses when you haven’t done a certificate in it?

But is it the organisations that are to blame, or the culture that has grown up, whereby no one is to blame for their own actions and for every accident there must be someone who can be held to account? Life is inherently risky and sometimes there is no one to blame. This is a scary, threatening idea because it opens us up to the reality of the randomness of life. Perhaps even more worryingly than the response from the councils, another spoof survey conducted by BBAB found that one in five people believe that there is a place for more rules and regulations around biscuit consumption in the UK. As comforting as the thought might be, sometimes there is no one to blame and regardless of how many rules there are, risk cannot be totally eradicated. Sometimes, it’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

SOURCE



Were millions of migrants let in by the British Labour Party government so that the Tories could be accused of racism?

Ministers face calls for an inquiry into claims that their open-door immigration policy was designed to make Britain more multicultural and allow Labour to portray the Tories as racists. A former Labour adviser alleged that the Government opened up Britain's borders in part to try to humiliate Right-wing opponents of immigration. The Conservatives said that if true, the claim demonstrated 'disgracefully irresponsible' decision-making and called for an investigation. Former Labour minister Frank Field said: 'I am speechless at the idea that people thought they could socially engineer a nation on this basis.'

The Daily Mail reported on Saturday the controversial claims by Andrew Neather, who worked for Tony Blair and Jack Straw. He said Labour's relaxation of immigration controls in 2000 was a deliberate attempt to engineer a 'truly multicultural' country and plug gaps in the jobs market. He said the 'major shift' in immigration policy was inspired by a 2001 policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think-tank based in the Cabinet Office. Civil servant Jonathan Portes, who wrote the immigration report, was a speechwriter for Gordon Brown and is now an aide to Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell.

The report painted a rosy picture of mass immigration, stating: 'There is little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration. The broader fiscal impact is likely to be positive because a greater proportion of migrants are of working age and migrants have higher average wages than natives.' It added: 'Most British regard immigration as having a positive effect on British culture.'

Mr Neather said the published version of the report focused on the labour market case for immigration. But he added: 'Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.' Ministers were reluctant to discuss the move publicly for fear that it would alienate Labour's core working-class vote, Mr Neather said. But they hoped it would allow them to paint the Conservatives as xenophobic and out of touch.

'I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date,' Mr Neather added.

Labour strategists went on to attack Tory leaders William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard as out of touch when they raised questions about immigration policy. Mr Hague was accused of 'playing the race card' in 2001 when he said Mr Blair was turning Britain into a 'foreign land'. Mr Howard was called a 'racist' in 2004 after he went to the BNP stronghold of Burnley to denounce Labour's stance on asylum seekers.

Mr Neather defended the open-door policy, saying mass immigration had 'enriched' Britain.

But Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green said: 'If this is true, then it would be a disgracefully irresponsible way for a government to run their immigration policy. 'To organise it on the basis of what might embarrass the Opposition would be shameful. I would urge the Home Affairs Select Committee to look at this whole episode. 'And ministers must now be honest with the British people. Do they still believe, as they did five years ago, that uncontrolled immigration is good for the country? 'If they don't, will they apologise for the mess they have made of the immigration system in the meantime?'

Jack Straw last night dismissed Mr Neather's claims as untrue. A spokesman for the Justice Secretary said: 'This is complete rubbish and the proof of that is the fact that Jack Straw introduced and was implementing the Immigration and Asylum Act at just this time, which tightened up controls and for which he was roundly condemned by all liberals.'

However, Labour's former welfare minister Mr Field, co-chairman of the cross-party Group for Balanced Migration, said a 'beam of truth' had been shone on the immigration issue. 'It is so dangerous that I cannot believe anybody even contemplated this course of action,' he said. 'I can't believe anybody could have been this stupid. All along anyone who raised questions was told they must be racist. 'Ministers used studies like the one saying only 13,000 people would come from the EU accession countries to say we had all got our figures wrong. 'Even now people are peddling the idea that it's all over-exaggerated. The truth is that, without any changes, we are headed for a population of 70million within 20 years.'

A Home Office spokesman said: 'Our new flexible points-based system gives us greater control of those coming to work or study from outside Europe, ensuring that only those that Britain needs can come. 'Britain's borders are stronger than ever before and we are rolling out ID cards for foreign nationals. 'We have introduced civil penalties for those employing illegal workers and from the end of next year our electronic border system will monitor 95 per cent of journeys in and out of the UK. 'The British people can be confident that immigration is under control.'

SOURCE



The British teachers who can do no right

A report claims that a third of teachers have been falsely accused of wrongdoing. Our writer argues that it's time parents recognised their responsibilities

Who would be a teacher in Britain today? The public may be surprised by a new poll that reveals 28 per cent of school staff have been falsely accused of wrongdoing by pupils, but most professionals who work in schools will not be. Living with parents’ criticism, complaints and false allegations from pupils has become part of a teachers’ lives. They work in a world where pupils feel they can make accusations because their parents will automatically back them, often with far-reaching results.

The poll by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers found that school staff who have been the subject of an unfounded allegation of misconduct by pupils, often have their careers blighted and their private lives damaged.

So how have we got to this situation where the adults involved in education, from parents to teachers, are in a not- so-civil civil war. And how does this affect the children they are trying to serve?

In my view, the first problem is that we now live in a culture where many of us no longer think twice before making a disparaging comment about any grown-ups in front of children. And as parents’ frustration with their children’s schools performance grows, it is the often hard-working teachers on whom they take it out.

Geraldine, for example, is an angry par- ent. This 39-year-old office administrator intends to sue her daughter’s Portsmouth primary school for failing to get Trish through the 11-plus. When I ask her: “Was it really the teachers’ fault?” she dismisses my question with a look of incomprehen- sion. She is, she says, “totally geared up” to “take on” her daughter’s “useless teachers”. But what example does this set Trish?

Tiff, a 41-year-old stay-at-home mum in Kent, is also a confident and seasoned advocate of her three children’s interest. Her latest triumph was to face down her 14-year-old daughter’s headmaster and force him to revoke the detention that she was given for texting in the middle of her science lessons. Tiff is so contemptuous towards her daughter’s headmaster that she calls him a “waste of space”. Her daughter, meanwhile, feels vindicated for her behaviour.

These mothers are just two of many examples of parental misbehaviour. Researching my new book Wasted: Why Education isn’t Educating, during which I spoke to scores of parents, it struck me how quickly they turned into vociferous critics of their children’s school. Often, they responded to a teacher’s criticism of their offspring as if it were a slight on themselves.

And the way grown-ups behave in everyday life does not go unnoticed by children. I have met kids as young as 8 or 9 who feel that they have permission to make fun of and attack their teachers. One group of 14-year-old boys whom I met in Canterbury routinely described their teachers to me as “losers”, “random” and “morons”.

On the other side, many teachers say that they now dread meeting their pupils’ parents. Parents’ evenings have become a battleground where the father or mother is the enemy. Greg, an experienced science teacher who works in a Manchester comprehensive, told me of his well-rehearsed routine for managing the “pushy parent”. “If you take their whining seriously they can turn your world upside-down,” he says. His solution is to “smile, switch off, look agreeable and move on as fast as possible”.

But not all teachers possess Greg’s confidence. Sue has been teaching drama in a Surrey school for two years. During that time she has had several rows with parents. She recalls that the low point of her career so far occurred when she had a shouting match with an angry parent in front of her class. A furious mother stormed into the school hall in the middle of a play rehearsal demanding to know why her son was not offered a more important part.

Another public face-off with an aggressive parent may prompt Sue to sign up for one of the many assertiveness-training courses for teachers that are now a growing strand of in-service instruction. They offer conflict management, mediation and communication skills for teachers requiring support to deal with difficult parents. It is a sign of the times that teachers’ organisations even now have leaflets on topics such as “fear of parents’ evenings”. One leaflet titled, Meet the Parents, published by the Teachers Support Network, cautions that it “can be a daunting experience”. It warns that sometimes parents will “support their child against the school — no matter what”, that they can turn “hostile, defensive and confrontational” and in rare cases even become “aggressive or violent”.

Predictably, sections of the teaching profession have responded to displays of parental disrespect by returning the favour. Educators blame parents for the low achievement and poor behaviour of their children. Without thinking of the damaging consequences for parental authority, many educators too have no inhibitions about ticking off irresponsible parents in front of their kids.

It is difficult to unravel the origins of the divisive feuds among grown-ups that afflict institutions of education. But it is evident to me that these squabbles have been exacerbated by recent government policies. A few months ago, a report published by the MP Alan Milburn argued for harnessing the energy of “pushy parents” to improve standards of education. He echoed the suggestion of the former Education Minister, Lord Adonis, that more pushy parents were needed to force schools to improve. In March, the Government announced a scheme that would allow parents and pupils to use “satisfaction ratings” to grade their school. Such measures risk reinforcing the tendency for parents to vent their frustration on their children’s schools, while failing to provide any constructive measures to improve the quality of education.

Mobilising parents’ instinctive love for their children to shore up the institution of education does not solve deep-seated problems. It simply encourages parents to become their children’s advocates, leading to the widespread adoption of the “my child, right or wrong” attitude. Once such attitudes gain momentum, parents can easily lose sight of what is in the best interest of their child and his or her classmates. One father told me that having challenged the mark that his daughter got for her geography project and questioned the teacher’s judgment, he knew that he had gone too far. “It got to be bigger than a dispute about the grade and it felt wrong,” he says.

It’s not hard to see how parents have got here. With increasing pressure on state schools and growing anxiety about standards, schooling has become a focus of intense competition for parents. Many devote considerable resources to get their children into a “good” school, some paying as much as £2,000 to get legal help with their appeal if children don’t win a place. Rob, 43, a businessman from Birmingham, was appalled when told that his 11-year-old son was refused a place in his school of choice. He appealed and showed up to a panel hearing with a solicitor, who specialised in education law. He says: “I made sure they knew that I meant business.”

Paying for legal advice, moving house to live in the catchment area of a desirable school, or even joining the congregation of a church with an attached school, is now not unusual. Studies indicate that a fifth of secondary pupils in England and Wales receive private tuition. In some middle-class secondary schools more than half of students had used a private tutor. Once the children are in the “right” school, their parents play an active role in helping them with their homework and projects. According to a report by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, two thirds of parents help their children with GCSE coursework — and many do far more than “help”: it is often parents, not the students, who are busy looking for information on the internet or at the library.

Despite all these efforts, petty and divisive bickering between parents and teachers will undermine all the good that parents try to do. If adults behave authoritatively towards youngsters at home and in their communities, teachers will feel comfortable in exercising authority in the classroom. However, if grown-ups point the finger at one another for a school’s alleged failing they undermine not only the authority of the teacher, but of all adults.

Education works best when it is underpinned by a genuine intergenerational conversation. Ideally, through such a conversation, the experience and wisdom of the adult world is transmitted to children. But when grown-ups find it difficult to speak with one voice and education becomes a battlefield on which pointless conflicts between grown-ups are fought, those intergenerational transactions are lost. Teachers and parents need to be on the same side — for the sake of education. Our children and our futures depend on it.

SOURCE



The real climate change catastrophe

In a new book, Christopher Booker reveals how a handful of scientists, who have pushed flawed theories on global warming for decades, now threaten to take us back to the Dark Ages

Next Thursday marks the first anniversary of one of the most remarkable events ever to take place in the House of Commons. For six hours MPs debated what was far and away the most expensive piece of legislation ever put before Parliament.

The Climate Change Bill laid down that, by 2050, the British people must cut their emissions of carbon dioxide by well over 80 per cent. Short of some unimaginable technological revolution, such a target could not possibly be achieved without shutting down almost the whole of our industrialised economy, changing our way of life out of recognition.

Even the Government had to concede that the expense of doing this – which it now admits will cost us £18?billion a year for the next 40 years – would be twice the value of its supposed benefits. Yet, astonishingly, although dozens of MPs queued up to speak in favour of the Bill, only two dared to question the need for it. It passed by 463 votes to just three.

One who voted against it was Peter Lilley who, just before the vote was taken, drew the Speaker’s attention to the fact that, outside the Palace of Westminster, snow was falling, the first October snow recorded in London for 74 years. As I observed at the time: “Who says that God hasn’t got a sense of humour?”

By any measure, the supposed menace of global warming – and the political response to it – has become one of the overwhelmingly urgent issues of our time. If one accepts the thesis that the planet faces a threat unprecedented in history, the implications are mind-boggling. But equally mind-boggling now are the implications of the price we are being asked to pay by our politicians to meet that threat. More than ever, it is a matter of the highest priority that we should know whether or not the assumptions on which the politicians base their proposals are founded on properly sound science.

This is why I have been regularly reporting on the issue in my column in The Sunday Telegraph, and this week I publish a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with climate change turning out to be the most costly scientific delusion in history?.

There are already many books on this subject, but mine is rather different from the rest in that, for the first time, it tries to tell the whole tangled story of how the debate over the threat of climate change has evolved over the past 30 years, interweaving the science with the politicians’ response to it.

It is a story that has unfolded in three stages. The first began back in the Seventies when a number of scientists noticed that the world’s temperatures had been falling for 30 years, leading them to warn that we might be heading for a new ice age. Then, in the mid-Seventies, temperatures started to rise again, and by the mid-Eighties, a still fairly small number of scientists – including some of those who had been predicting a new ice age – began to warn that we were now facing the opposite problem: a world dangerously heating up, thanks to our pumping out CO? and all those greenhouse gases inseparable from modern civilisation.

In 1988, a handful of the scientists who passionately believed in this theory won authorisation from the UN to set up the body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was the year when the scare over global warming really exploded into the headlines, thanks above all to the carefully staged testimony given to a US Senate Committee by Dr James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), also already an advocate for the theory that CO? was causing potentially catastrophic warming.

The disaster-movie scenario that rising levels of CO? could lead to droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and, above all, that melting of the polar ice caps, which would flood half the world’s major cities, struck a rich chord. The media loved it. The environmentalists loved it. More and more politicians, led by Al Gore in the United States, jumped on the bandwagon. But easily their most influential allies were the scientists running the new IPCC, led by a Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin and Dr John Houghton, head of the UK Met Office.

The IPCC, through its series of weighty reports, was now to become the central player in the whole story. But rarely has the true nature of any international body been more widely misrepresented. It is commonly believed that the IPCC consists of “1,500 of the world’s top climate scientists”, charged with weighing all the scientific evidence for and against “human-induced climate change” in order to arrive at a “consensus”.

In fact, the IPCC was never intended to be anything of the kind. The vast majority of its contributors have never been climate scientists. Many are not scientists at all. And from the start, the purpose of the IPCC was not to test the theory, but to provide the most plausible case for promoting it. This was why the computer models it relied on as its chief source of evidence were all programmed to show that, as CO? levels continued to rise, so temperatures must inevitably follow.

One of the more startling features of the IPCC is just how few scientists have been centrally involved in guiding its findings. They have mainly been British and American, led for a long time by Dr Houghton (knighted in 1991) as chairman of its scientific working group, who in 1990 founded the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for research into climate change. The centre has continued to play a central role in selecting the IPCC’s contributors to this day, and along with the Climate Research Unit run by Professor Philip Jones at the University of East Anglia, controls HadCrut, one of the four official sources of global temperature data (another of the four, GIStemp, is run by the equally committed Dr Hansen and his British-born right-hand man, Dr Gavin Schmidt).

With remarkable speed, from the time of its first report in 1990, the IPCC and its computer models won over many of the world’s politicians, led by those of the European Union. In 1992, the UN staged its extraordinary Earth Summit in Rio, attended by 108 prime ministers and heads of state, which agreed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; and this led in 1997 to the famous Kyoto Protocol, committing the world’s governments to specific targets for reducing CO?.

Up to this point, the now officially accepted global-warming theory seemed only too plausible. Both CO? levels and world temperatures had continued to rise, exactly as the IPCC’s computer models predicted. We thus entered the second stage of the story, lasting from 1998 to 2006, when the theory seemed to be carrying everything before it.

The politicians, most notably in the EU, were now beginning to adopt every kind of measure to combat the supposed global-warming menace, from building tens of thousands of wind turbines to creating elaborate schemes for buying and selling the right to emit CO?, the gas every plant in the world needs for life.

But however persuasive the case seemed to be, there were just beginning to be rather serious doubts about the methods being used to promote it. More and more questions were being asked about the IPCC’s unbalanced approach to evidence – most notably in its promotion of the so-called “hockey stick” graph, produced in time for its 2001 report by a hitherto obscure US scientist Dr Michael Mann, purporting to show how global temperatures had suddenly been shooting up to levels quite unprecedented in history.

One of the hockey stick’s biggest fans was Al Gore, who in 2006 made it the centrepiece of his Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. But it then turned out that almost every single scientific claim in Gore’s film was either wildly exaggerated or wrong. The statistical methods used to create the hockey-stick graph were so devastatingly exposed by two Canadian statisticians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (as was confirmed in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress) that the graph has become one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science.

The supporters of the hockey stick, highly influential in the IPCC, hit back. Proudly calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, their membership again reflects how small has been the number of closely linked scientists centrally driving the warming scare. They include Philip Jones, in charge of the HadCrut official temperature graph, and Gavin Schmidt, Hansen’s right-hand man at GISS –which itself came under fire for “adjusting” its temperature data to exaggerate the warming trend.

Then, in 2007, the story suddenly entered its third stage. In a way that had been wholly unpredicted by those IPCC computer models, global temperatures started to drop. Although CO2 levels continued to rise, after 25 years when temperatures had risen, the world’s climate was visibly starting to cool again.

More and more eminent scientists have been coming out of the woodwork to suggest that the IPCC, with its computer models, had got it all wrong. It isn’t CO? that has been driving the climate, the changes are natural, driven by the activity of the sun and changes in the currents of the world’s oceans.

The ice caps haven’t been melting as the alarmists and the models predicted they should. The Antarctic, containing nearly 90 per cent of all the ice in the world, has actually been cooling over the past 30 years, not warming. The polar bears are not drowning – there are four times more of them now than there were 40 years ago. In recent decades, the number of hurricanes and droughts have gone markedly down, not up.

As the world has already been through two of its coldest winters for decades, with all the signs that we may now be entering a third, the scientific case for CO2 threatening the world with warming has been crumbling away on an astonishing scale.

Yet it is at just this point that the world’s politicians, led by Britain, the EU and now President Obama, are poised to impose on us far and away the most costly set of measures that any group of politicians has ever proposed in the history of the world – measures so destructive that even if only half of them were implemented, they would take us back to the dark ages.

We have “less than 50 days” to save the planet, declared Gordon Brown last week, in yet another desperate bid to save the successor to the Kyoto treaty, which is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in six weeks’ time. But no one has put the reality of the situation more succinctly than Prof Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, one of the most distinguished climatologists in the world, who has done as much as anyone in the past 20 years to expose the emptiness of the IPCC’s claim that its reports represent a “consensus” of the views of “the world’s top climate scientists”.

In words quoted on the cover of my new book, Prof Lindzen wrote: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly exaggerated computer predictions combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.”

Such is the truly extraordinary position in which we find ourselves. Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.

How long will it be before sanity and sound science break in on what begins to look like one of the most bizarre collective delusions ever to grip the human race?

SOURCE



The nonsense never stops: Ordinary people are the enemy

Drop meat for vegetarian diet to fight climate warming says British apparatchik

PEOPLE will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming. Lord Stern said: "Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources. A vegetarian diet is better." Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

He predicted that people's attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. "I think it's important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating," he said. "I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food."

Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank and now I. G. Patel Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, warned that British taxpayers would need to contribute about pounds 3 billion a year by 2015 to help poor countries to cope with the inevitable impact of climate change.

He also issued a clear message to President Obama that he must attend the meeting in Copenhagen in person in order for an effective deal to be reached. US leadership, he said, was "desperately needed" to secure a deal.

He said that he was deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. "I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary," he added.

Up to 20,000 delegates from 192 countries are due to attend the UN conference in the Danish capital. Its aim is to forge a deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent an increase in global temperatures of more than 2C. Any increase above this level is expected to trigger runaway climate change, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Lord Stern said that Copenhagen presented a unique opportunity for the world to break free from its catastrophic current trajectory. He said that the world needed to agree to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to 25 gigatonnes a year from the current level of 50 gigatonnes.

UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.

Lord Stern, who said that he was not a strict vegetarian himself, was speaking on the eve of an all-parliamentary debate on climate change. His remarks provoked anger from the meat industry.

Jonathan Scurlock, of the National Farmers Union, said: "Going vegetarian is not a worldwide solution. It's not a view shared by the NFU. Farmers in this country are interested in evidence-based policymaking. We don't have a methane-free cow or pig available to us." On average, a British person eats 50g of protein derived from meat each day - the equivalent of a chicken breast or a lamb chop. This is a relatively low level for a wealthy country but between 25 per cent and 50 per cent higher than the amount recommended by the World Health Organisation.

Su Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Vegetarian Society, welcomed Lord Stern's remarks. "What we choose to eat is one of the biggest factors in our personal impact on the environment," she said. "Meat uses up a lot of resources and a vegetarian diet consumes a lot less land and water. One of the best things you can do about climate change is reduce the amount of meat in your diet." The UN has warned that meat consumption is on course to double by the middle of the century.

SOURCE




Kiss and tell: UK census wants to know your sleeping partner: "Here is some sound advice for anyone having an illicit love affair: if you do not want to be found out, do not arrange to sleep together on the night of March 27-28 2011. That is the night when the Government is going to count the British population, creating a precise, comprehensive record of who was sleeping where, how old they were, what ethnic background they came from, and what kind of central heating kept them warm that night. The 2011 census is already being called a ’snoopers’ charter.’ It is certainly going to give everyone an incentive not to lay their head to rest in the wrong house, at least for that one night. The Conservatives complained yesterday that the 32-page questionnaire is too long, too expensive, and likely to undermine public support for the exercise, especially since anyone who does not fill in the form risks a £1,000 fine. They will be sent out by post but it will be possible to fill them in online.”





27 October, 2009

British grandmother who objected to homosexual march is accused of hate crime

After witnessing a gay pride march, committed Christian Pauline Howe wrote to the council to complain that the event had been allowed to go ahead. But instead of a simple acknowledgement, she received a letter warning her she might be guilty of a hate crime and that the matter had been passed to police. Two officers later turned up at the frightened grandmother's home and lectured her about her choice of words before telling her she would not be prosecuted.

Mrs Howe, 67, whose husband Peter is understood to be a Baptist minister, yesterday spoke of her shock at the visit and accused police of ' wasting resources' on her case rather than fighting crime. 'I've never been in any kind of trouble before so I was stunned to have two police officers knocking at my door,' she said. 'Their presence in my home made me feel threatened. It was a very unpleasant experience. 'The officers told me that my letter was thought to be an intention of hate but I was expressing views as a Christian.'

Mrs Howe's case has been taken up by the Christian Institute, which is looking into potential breaches of freedom of speech and religious rights under the Human Rights Act, either by Norwich City Council or Norfolk Police. And homosexual equality pressure group Stonewall has branded the authorities' response 'disproportionate'.

Mrs Howe claims she was 'verbally abused' while distributing 'Christian leaflets' at the march in the centre of Norwich in July. She said someone 'whispered something in my ear and disappeared'. She fired off a letter to the council describing the march as a 'public display of indecency' that was 'offensive to God'.

She wrote: 'It is shameful that this small but vociferous lobby should be allowed such a display unwarranted by the minimal number of homosexuals.' The letter went on to describe homosexuals as 'sodomites', said homosexuality had 'contributed to the downfall of every empire' and added that 'gay sex was a major cause of sexually transmitted infections'.

But Mrs Howe told the Sunday Telegraph her comments were an expression of her beliefs, not homophobia. She received a response from the council's deputy chief executive, Bridget Buttinger, who said it was the local authority's 'duty... to eliminate discrimination of all kinds'. She went on: 'The content of your letter has been assessed as potentially being hate related because of the views you expressed towards people of a certain sexual orientation. 'Your details and details of the contents of your letter have been recorded as such and passed to the police.' The two police officers later turned up at her home in Poringland, near Norwich, and informed her the contents of her letter had caused offence.

The incident has echoes of the case of a pensioner couple who were lectured by officers from Lancashire Police on the evils of 'homophobia' and 'hate crimes' after criticising gay rights in a letter to Wyre Borough Council. Joe Roberts and his wife Helen, both Christians, were later awarded damages.

Christian Institute spokesman Mike Judge said yesterday: 'People must be free to express their beliefs - yes, even unpopular beliefs - to government bodies without fear of a knock at the door from police. 'It's not a crime to be Christian but it increasingly feels like it.'

Stonewall's chief executive, Ben Summerskill, said: 'Clearly her views are pretty offensive but nevertheless this [response] is disproportionate.'

Norfolk Police defended their treatment of Mrs Howe, saying: 'We investigate all alleged hate incidents. In this instance the individual concerned was visited by officers, the comments discussed, and no further action was taken.'

SOURCE



Why won't men date successful women?

Another British woman realizes that ignoring biology has large costs. I myself have always been incapable of relationships with dumb women and in fact have always felt that a woman cannot be too smart for me. I must note however that my third wife, Jenny, although smart, was/is an "ur" mother who has/had no intellectual or career interests and it is she who blessed me with my only son -- JR

When a long relationship broke down a few years ago, my then boyfriend cited my intelligence as a reason that it wouldn't work. Did he mean I was too stupid? That he couldn't bear to be with a bimbo who couldn't hold a sensible discussion? Sadly, it was quite the opposite. He told me that he just didn't want to go out with a woman who was clever and successful. He said it meant that I could never let any discussion go, or concede a flawed argument; I had to solve problems when they arose, and would argue political points with him. He was an actor in his 50s and said he just wanted 'an easy life'. In other words, he wanted a bovine woman who wouldn't challenge him mentally or emotionally - someone who would make him feel superior and boost his self-esteem.

After we separated, I began to wonder how much men feel this need to be dominant in a relationship in order to feel sexually attracted to their mate. If that's true, then being with a strong, clever, capable woman must be a turn-off.

I became increasingly convinced of this when my next relationship developed the same pattern. I invited my new boyfriend to see me perform my one-woman show on stage in London. Before he walked in to the play, we were tactile and it struck me that I had high hopes for the relationship. An hour later, after watching me on stage and then networking with a group of high-powered theatre people at the aftershow party, he became distant. I knew instantly what the problem was: I was a self-evidently successful woman, he was a jobbing gardener, albeit a clever one. He barely said anything to me, merely mumbled an awkward 'Well done' and positioned himself in a corner looking glum with a beer.

After that, I tried to play down my achievements. I even found myself disguising the fact that I'd been to Cambridge, and instead used a throwaway line about being 'at uni'. Was I wrong to disguise my intelligence in an attempt to make myself more attractive?

A month or so later, he told me that 'he was just not boyfriend material'. 'Why not?' I replied. 'Because you've got two flats,' he said glumly, 'and I haven't even got one.' Crazy as it may sound, given that I was far from rich, he clearly felt emasculated by what he regarded as my success, and ran away to watch rugby and chat up small feline creatures in the bars of South Wales.

If I go on a date now, I've found I avoid talking about my career. I can keep this up for a few dates, which is better than nothing, but I know it won't last for ever.

In our race to compete with men in the world of work, women have adopted masculine tactics, and also their characteristics. We have become masculine - and men don't want to date women who think like men. We have lost our femininity, our softness, our ditziness if you like, and in so doing have blocked the ancient signals that reach out to a man's brain saying: 'Come and rescue me.'

Modern women have learned to regard men as the competition, in order to get ahead professionally. And while men can accept this female aggression in the workplace, they evidently can't in relationships. The question this leaves successful women with is whether we should learn to be submissive, socially and domestically, in order to attract a mate. That's quite a challenge for a generation that has always refused to compromise when it comes to our careers.

Perhaps that's why all my single girlfriends are all the most successful ones. Caroline runs a record label, Vicky is a photographer, Nadia is a famous actress. All my other 'less successful' friends are ensconced in long-term partnerships - all of them have put their careers on hold in order to maintain their relationships.

Much as I hate to say it, I think we successful women are to blame for men's reluctance to be with us. In the process of becoming Alpha women, we've lost our femininity. If we want to be happy in relationships, we have to get that back - even if that means 'unlearning' some of the things that have got us to the top. What do we want more - a relationship or a career? Almost all the women I've asked that question want a relationship, including me.

Men love vulnerable women. We need to accept that, just because we've changed, we can't expect them to. I don't think they can. Successful women have reached crisis point and maybe we have to acknowledge we can't undo our evolutionary changes. Perhaps long-term relationships aren't a reality for very high achievers, and maybe we have to accept that our careers will have to be a substitute for love, however sad that might be.

SOURCE



Sex trafficking into Britain: No evidence for Harman’s law

Far-Leftist Harriet Harman's sex trafficking law is based on feeble, fraudulent evidence

Here's the line. Women are being trafficked into Britain and forced to become sex slaves. We know this because the massive Operation Pentameter, involving 55 police forces, six government departments and various NGOs, led to the arrest of 528 sex traffickers. On the basis of this, Harriet Harman is rightly pushing through a bill to make it illegal to pay for sex with a prostitute controlled by someone else.

Except it's all lies. As Nick Davies reports, the six-month investigation actually failed to find a single sex trafficker. Ten of the 55 police forces arrested nobody at all. Some 122 of the 528 arrests claimed never happened (they were wrongly recorded, or phantom arrests designed to chase targets). Half (230) were women – suggesting that the Operation was a convenient excuse to harass prostitutes and clock up more arrest figures.

Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced their 'success', 106 without any charge at all, and 47 being cautioned for minor offences. Of the rest, 73 were charged with immigration breaches, 76 convicted on drugs raps, and others died or disappeared.

Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women. Seven were acquitted. The net haul from this vast operation was 15 successful prosecutions. Of those, just five men were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes (two of whom were already in custody).

So that's the 'huge success' that allowed Jacqui Smith and now Harriet Harman, to claim that 'thousands' of women were being trafficked, and to push a Bill through Parliament. So much for evidence-based policy: I would feel happier if they just said that they found prostitution disgusting and wanted to outlaw it for our own moral good. At least that would be honest. This is simple deception, a fraud on the public.

Sex workers are opposing the new legislation. They know that every time governments 'get tough' on prostitution, they are the ones who suffer. The police just have another excuse to go on fishing trips, round up a few girls, and boost their arrest figures so that they get Brownie points and the Chief Constable gets a better bonus. And to prove that they are not 'controlled', girls will start working alone, rather than in flats with a maid to look after them, which will make them more vulnerable to abuse and attack. Thanks, Harriet.

SOURCE



Former Archbishop of Canterbury calls for "clear caps on population growth"

Carey is a man of undoubted personal holiness. He won great respect in his time as Cantuar and is one of the few Archbishops of Canterbury in recent times who clearly believes in God

In what will be seen as a very unhelpful intervention to the debate on immigration by many church campaigners for the rights of migrants and refugees, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, has called for a "clear cap" on population growth.

In comments given to today's News of the World he blamed an “open door policy on immigration” for the rise of the British National Party. He also blamed a failure to "absorb" new communities and called for immigration to take centre stage at the next general election.

Many church campaigners have been deliberately pursing an alternative strategy that would avoid the issue becoming a political football at the time of the election.

Carey told the News of the World: “The cowardly failure of successive governments to address our open borders is the reason the BNP has gained admittance to the political mainstream. “With the latest estimate that our population will rise by nearly 10 million by 2030, politicians are ducking the unpalatable truth: we are now one of the most over-populated countries in the world.” “It is asking a huge amount of the British public to accept an open-door policy on immigration. They have seen a massive influx of newcomers, they have seen their jobs hit, and they feel ignored. There have not been adequate resources to help [the] community adapt to these massive changes.

"Yet it is not only a question of resources but the failure to absorb and integrate new communities. The discredited policy of multiculturalism must be abandoned once and for all. Now a controlled approach to immigration is needed with clear caps set on population growth. If the mainstream parties begin listening to the voters, the BNP can be consigned again to the fringes. "Make no mistake about it, immigration must be a major item on next year's General Election agenda."

His comments came as he also urged Christians to unite against the BNP's claims to be a Christian party defending "Christian Britain."

SOURCE



Half of the British think creationism should be taught alongside evolution

More than half of all Britons believe that creationism and other theories about the origins of life should be taught alongside evolution in school science lessons, according to a survey published today. The study, published to coincide with a British Council symposium on science education, suggests that three-quarters of adults support the teaching of evolution. But only one in five thinks this should be to the exclusion of theories such as creationism and intelligent design.

There has been growing controversy over the place of alternative theories in schools. Professor Michael Reiss was sacked last year as the Royal Society’s director of education after arguing that creationism and intelligent design should be addressed as a “world view” if they were raised by pupils.

There was further controversy this summer when the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance asked GCSE candidates to compare creationism with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Creationism is the literal interpretation of scripture, while intelligent design holds that living organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone.

National Curriculum guidelines stipulate that evolution alone should be taught in science lessons, while creationism may be discussed as part of religious education. But it has been estimated that as many as ten per cent of pupils now come from families that believe in the accounts of divine creation in the Bible or the Koran.

The MORI research, commissioned by the British Council, polled 1,000 adults in Britain among 12,000 in ten countries, including America, Russia and India. British support for teaching other theories alongside evolution was higher, at 54 per cent, than in any of the other countries apart from Argentina and Mexico. But Britain had the lowest proportion (6 per cent) believing that other theories should be taught in preference to evolution.

However, when responses were restricted to those who had heard of Charles Darwin and knew something of his theory of evolution, the proportion supporting lessons on evolution alone rose from 21 per cent to 24 per cent. Among the more informed group, 60 per cent favoured the mixed approach.

Dr Fern Elsdon-Baker, the head of the British Council’s Darwin Now programme, which is running today's symposium at the National Science Learning Centre on evolution and education, said: “One of the most interesting findings of our survey is that there is evidence the more people understand about evolutionary theory the more enthusiastic they are about it being taught as part of the science curriculum.”

But Dr Baker added that the overall level of support for the teaching of theories other than evolution might reflect a need for a "more sophisticated approach to teaching and communicating how science works as a process, and how it is debated alongside other perspectives". The council is launching a range of international education resources on the subject for schools, museums and science centres.

Professor Reiss, who is now Professor of Science Education at the Institute of Education, in London, is speaking at the symposium. He said he was not surprised that so many people felt that creationism and intelligent design should be taught in schools, even though they were not scientific theories. "In my experience in the UK, the overwhelming majority of science teachers do not want creationism or intelligent design taught as valid scientific alternatives to evolution, but are often comfortable with pupils bringing up such ideas," Professor Reiss said. "When I was taught science, we were allowed to bring anything up in lessons.

SOURCE



Is salt really the Devil's ingredient?

More fad "science": The British Government wants people to reduce their sodium intake, but studies show that this advice should be taken with a pinch of salt

Salt: is your food full of it? That is the question posed by Jenny Eclair in the Food Standards Agency's recent TV ad for its latest salt awareness campaign. Salt, we are told, pervades every aspect of our diet, from the bowl of cereal we had at breakfast, to the sandwich we ate at lunchtime to the takeaway curry we’re planning tonight.

Too much of the white stuff will raise blood pressure and increase the likelihood of heart disease and strokes. Like its evil twin, saturated fat, it seems logical that our goal should be to cut down on it, but now a growing number of experts claim that salt is not the devil’s ingredient we have been lead to believe it.

This month researchers from the department of nutrition at the University of California found compelling evidence that it may even be difficult to consume too much salt. Professor David McCarron measured salt losses in the urine of almost 20,000 people in 33 countries worldwide and his findings indicated that the complex interplay between our brains and organs naturally regulates salt intake. Reporting in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Professor McCarron said: “It is unrealistic to attempt to regulate sodium consumption through public policy when it appears that our bodies naturally dictate how much sodium we consume to maintain a physiologically set normal range.”

What we do know from other research is that eating less salt will lower blood pressure and cardiovascular risk in people with existing hypertension, but critics argue that for the rest of the population the advice on salt consumption should be taken with, well, a pinch of salt.

While some studies show that people who reduce their daily intake by 1g-2g find that their blood pressure falls, others reveal that huge swings in salt consumption have little effect, with a few showing that blood pressure actually rises.

Among those now questioning the demonisation of our favourite seasoning is Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George’s Hospital in London, who believes the current pressure to restrict salt in the diet as much as possible is unnecessary and potentially risky. “The issue has been blown out of proportion,” Collins says. “Salt reduction is very important for people who already have raised blood pressure, but for most people who don’t have hypertension, there is no real benefit to be had from making huge efforts to cut down. It is certainly is not the dietary outcast it is portrayed to be.”

This a view is shared by Michael Alderman, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and a past president of the International Society of Hypertension, who has spent years researching the effects of salt on health. “Only one rigorous, randomised clinical trial on salt intake has been reported so far,” Alderman says. “As it turned out, the group that adhered to a lower sodium diet actually suffered significantly more cardiovascular deaths and hospitalisations than did the one assigned to the higher sodium diet.”

Salt — sodium chloride — is an element essential for health. Every cell in the body needs sodium to function — it is required to regulate fluid balance and for nerves and muscles, such as those in the heart, to function well. Too little salt can cause mental confusion, an inability to concentrate and, in extreme cases, the potentially fatal condition hyponatraemia, which leads to body salts becoming dangerously diluted and the brain swelling beyond the skull’s capacity.

Not that salt depletion is a risk for the average Briton. Although intake has fallen as food manufacturers have begun to add less salt to food, the latest figures from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) show that the average person still consumes 8.6g of salt a day — that’s 0.9g less than in 2000-01, but, not low enough for the FSA. Its long-term goal is to have everybody cut salt to 6g a day.

In theory, this will prevent strokes and heart attacks by lowering blood pressure. What divides experts is whether mass salt avoidance will make much of a difference to statistics on cardiovascular health. Alderman says that, to date, most of the studies on salt-lowering have been observational, in which the diet habits of different groups are analysed to find any correlation between salt and heart health. Many of them have produced mixed results.

In research conducted at Loyola University in Chicago earlier this year, for instance, Dr Paul Whelton, the president of the university’s health department, followed nearly 3,000 patients for 10-15 years to find out whether the salt they ate had an impact on blood-pressure readings.

After measuring the amount of salt in the urine of his subjects to assess their consumption levels, Whelton found that whether they had used the salt shaker liberally or not did not appear to make any significant difference to their risk of heart disease. What mattered more, Whelton reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine, was the ratio of salt intake to that of potassium, another dietary mineral (found plentifully in foods such as bananas, avocado, sweet potato and tuna) that is known to balance out the artery-tightening effects of sodium.

An earlier report published in the British Medical Journal in 2002 reviewed the evidence on whether salt avoidance could lower blood pressure and found that, while it was helpful to those on medication for hypertension, there were no clear benefits for anyone else. Similarly, when researchers from Copenhagen University reviewed the available literature for the Cochrane Collaboration in 2003, they concluded “there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake”.

In fact, Alderman says that of nine observational studies looking at a total of more than 100,000 people, four papers found that reduced dietary salt was associated with an increased risk of death and disability from heart attacks. “In one that focused on obese people, more salt was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular death,” he says. “But in the remaining four no association was seen.”

However, for those advocating salt cuts — and they remain the majority — the evidence against high-sodium diets is clear. Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine at St George’s Hospital and chair of the Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH) dismisses the negative take on salt reduction as “balderdash” claiming that such findings are “usually put out by the food industry” to bolster their own cause. [An ad hominem argument. The man is no scientist] “From the day you are born, your blood pressure starts to go up slowly,” MacGregor says. “Salt is a major factor in that and high-salt diets are the main reason why blood pressure rises with age. And more deaths are linked to raised blood pressure than anything else.”

Precisely how salt raises blood pressure is not entirely clear. It is thought that when salt intake is too high, the kidneys to pass it all into the urine and some ends up in the bloodstream. This then draws more water into the blood, increasing volume and pressure.

MacGregor says that reducing salt to the 6 gram daily levels recommended by the FSA could lead to a 16 per cent reduction in deaths from strokes and a 12 per cent reduction in deaths from coronary heart disease. “The evidence that links salt to blood pressure is as strong as that linking cigarette smoking to cancer and heart disease,” he says. “If successful, the reduction to 6 grams a day would have the biggest impact of any public health campaign ever.”

Everybody could do with cutting down. In 2008, MacGregor and his colleagues published a study in the Journal of Human Hypertension, which looked at the salt intakes of 1,658 people aged 7 to 18 in the UK. They found salt to be responsible for raising blood pressure in children.

Once more, though, the findings were disputed. In an accompanying editorial, Professor Alderman questioned the link, pointing out that those who ate more salt merely ate more food. Adjusting for calorie intake, Alderman suggested, wiped out the significance of the relationship.

So where does this leave a nation that is being urged to become more salt-savvy? If we scrutinise food labels for their salt content we may live longer. But we may not.

Collins advises against becoming preoccupied with totting up daily salt scores and says she increasingly encounters people whose serum sodium levels have dipped to a dangerous low. “Extreme dieters and vegetarians seem to be most at risk,” she says. “Salt occurs naturally in many of the foods they avoid such as cheese and meat. Since these people are often also drinking copious amounts of water because they think it’s healthy, they often display early signs of hyponatraemia, all linked to their low salt intake.”

In countries where populations are given free access to salt, people typically consume about 5g-8g a day. “A lot of people could relax about their salt intake. If you don’t have hypertension to begin with, then just trying to eat healthily will ensure you don’t get too much,” Collins says. “Advice to cut back on salt really is the poorest of all the dietary messages around.”

SOURCE



The endemic Leftist censorship of dissent

Alive and well even in the administration of a small English city

A POLITICAL row has broken out over a Derby Conservative councillor's decision to show a climate change-sceptic film in the city's council chamber. The new film, Not Evil Just Wrong, is a documentary which suggests evidence of global warming is inconclusive and that the impact climate change laws will have on industry is much more harmful to humans than beneficial. It is a direct challenge to Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, with was shown to councillors in Derby during Labour's control of the authority in 2007.

Tory councillor Frank Leeming put forward the idea to show the new film today, sparking criticism from Labour councillors. Labour group leader Chris Williamson said: "I am totally appalled. The council is committed to reducing carbon emissions, yet the Conservatives are pushing a film which threatens all of that. "It reaffirms our belief that the Conservatives have merely been paying lip service to environmental issues in pushing their new branding as a caring party."

And Labour councillor Ranjit Banwait, who is vice-chairman of the council's climate change commission, called for the resignation of its Conservative chairman. He said: "If the Conservatives don't believe in climate change, then perhaps the chairman of the commission, Tory councillor Phil Ingall, should step down. "They're setting an incredibly dangerous precedent. They're peddling a viewpoint which disputes what scientists have already proved about the state of the planet. Why would they do that?"

But Harvey Jennings, leader of the Conservative group, said Mr Leeming's view was not shared by the group as a whole, adding that the Tories were "committed to tackling climate change" and believed it was a reality. He said: "This is about facilitating freedom of speech." He added that Mr Leeming's actions were not an embarrassment to his party.

Mr Leeming confirmed he was a climate change sceptic. He said: "Al Gore's film contained nine 'facts' which were wrong – and this film shows scientists answering those points." He said he did not feel his strong views, which differ from the local Tory group's stance, meant he should not be a member of the party. "We are a democratic group which allows free speech. I don't see any reason why I shouldn't do this," he said.

Conservative MEP Roger Helmer is an outspoken sceptic of climate change and has even published his own book challenging the issue. He said it was right that councillors should be able to show another side to the debate over climate change and screened the film himself in the European parliament. "There is no point saying a party which has signed up to a green agenda is not allowed to say a word, that is not honest politics," he said.

SOURCE



British police banned from saying 'Evening all'

With the number of ordinary words that are banned, it would be no surprise if they felt it was too risky to open their mouths at all on many occasions

"Police officers in the UK have been told to avoid using the classic "Evenin' all" greeting because it may confuse ethnic minorities. Warwickshire Police's handbook 'Policing Our Communities', issued to every member of its staff, gives advice on communicating with people from different ethnic groups in a section entitled 'Communication, Some Do's & Don'ts'.

It states: 'Don't assume those words for the time of day, such as afternoon or evening have the same meaning.' A force spokesman said: 'Terms such as 'afternoon' and 'evening' are somewhat subjective in meaning and can vary according to a person's culture or nationality.

'The point is there is an element of subjectivity leading to a variation between cultures that we need to be aware of - taking steps as far as possible to ensure our communication is effective in serving the public.'

In another section entitled 'Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Communities' the force's handbook confusingly states that the phrase 'lesbians and gay men' is likely to be satisfactory for most situations when talking about sexual orientation.

But it says 'homosexual' is 'best avoided' as the word is 'interpreted differently by many, and relates to sexual practice as opposed to sexual orientation.'

Following a Freedom of Information request to police forces and fire services about the guidance they give their staff on their use of language, it has also emerged that a number of organisations, including Essex Police and Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service, instruct staff to avoid the phrases 'child, youth or youngster.' This is because such phrases could have 'connotations of inexperience, impetuosity, and unreliability or even dishonesty'.

The same guide also warns against the phrases 'manning the phones', 'layman's terms' and 'the tax man', for 'making women invisible'. London Fire Brigade instructs its staff not to use the terms 'businessmen' or 'housewives' because they 'reinforce outdated stereotypes'.

Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign said: 'Those writing these guides are over-analysing things. It's political correctness gone crazy. 'I feel sorry for the poor emergency service workers who have grown up in a country where the words they being told not to use are familiar and part of every day language. 'Is anyone really going to be confused by 'evening'? And if you can't say what a lovely afternoon it is, what are you meant to say - what a lovely 3pm?

Source

26 October, 2009

It's time to slay the bureaucratic monster that's ruining the NHS

Why is there a layer of bureaucracy between Primary Care Trusts and the British government?

Who actually runs the National Health Service in my Sevenoaks constituency? Is it Dawn Hall, the manager of Sevenoaks hospital, or Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Health? There are an awful lot of people between Dawn Hall and Andy Burnham, and most of them aren't medical at all.

First, there's the West Kent NHS Primary Care Trust. It has 21 directors, and "around" 350 "commissioning" staff; management costs are £12 million a year. Its accounts reveal a director of strategy and corporate affairs, whose pay last year rose from £90-95,000 to £95-100,000, and a director of strategy and communications, whose pay went up by 10 per cent to £85-90,000. All executive directors received a 3 per cent bonus.

Next, there's the Kent & Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust, which is mainly responsible for mental health services. Fifteen directors here, including a "director of corporate services" on £75-80,000 a year. Management costs are £11 million.

Then there's the Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, which runs three acute hospitals. Management costs increased 7 per cent last year, to £9 million. Reporting to 10 board directors are a corporate development director (£85-90,000), a chief operating officer (£155-160,000), as well as a chief executive (£190-195,000).

Serving the trusts is another – the South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Trust. It has 13 directors, including a director of corporate affairs and service development (£90-95,000) and a director of human resources and organisational development (£105-110,000). Management costs are £10 million, 6.6 per cent of income, and rose 25 per cent in 2008-09.

But the queen quango of them all is our Strategic Health Authority, NHS South East Coast. It has 14 directors, including a director of communications and engagement who was paid £125-130,000 last year. In 2008-09, its budget was so large – at £313 million – that it couldn't spend £40 million. Management costs rose 30 per cent, to £16.8 million. Employing 343 staff cost £20 million a year.

So what do they do for us in Sevenoaks at their HQ in Horley, Surrey? Given that the Primary Care Trusts are much larger now, why is there a layer of bureaucracy between them and Whitehall?

The hospital building programme has passed its peak; the trusts have been reorganised; there are numerous regulators, inspectorates and commissions. So what is there strategic to do?

NHS South East Coast's report boasts a string of successes, including reducing infection, speeding up treatment times and extending GPs' opening times. But these improvements are delivered by local professionals, not regional bureaucrats. The Strategic Health Authority even claims credit for the Ambulance Trust's improvement in response times: that's because we spend £150 million on the latter, not the former. So what's a strategic health authority for?

Let's look at that under-spend again. £1.5 million was under-spent on "workforce and development"; £5.6 million (62 per cent of budget) was under-spent on "sponsored services"; £11.4 million (55 per cent) under-spent on "strategic health authority central initiatives".

If regional bureaucrats can't even spend the money they have got, why not delegate it straight through to the trusts? There is simply too much management right across the NHS, most of it duplicating, interfering or counter-productive, and all of it diverting resources from the hard-pressed units and nurses who treat real people.

Andy Burnham has inherited this nightmare, but it's too late for Labour to roll back the bureaucratic monster it created. Exactly half of the entire 1.3 million NHS workforce isn't treating patients. The real questions are for the Conservative shadow health secretary: Andrew Lansley, are you listening?

SOURCE



British Labour Party let in migrants 'to engineer multicultural UK'

Nice to see it admitted. The usual Leftist hatred of their own society at work

Huge increases in immigration over the past decade were a deliberate attempt to engineer a more multicultural Britain, a former Government adviser said yesterday. Andrew Neather, a speechwriter who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, said Labour's relaxation of controls was a plan to 'open up the UK to mass migration'.

As well as bringing in hundreds of thousands to plug labour market gaps, there was also a 'driving political purpose' behind immigration policy, he claimed. Ministers hoped to change the country radically and 'rub the Right's nose in diversity'. But Mr Neather said senior Labour figures were reluctant to discuss the policy, fearing it would alienate its 'core working-class vote'.

On Question Time, Mr Straw was repeatedly quizzed about whether Labour's immigration policies had left the door open for the BNP.

Writing in the Evening Standard, Mr Neather revealed the 'major shift' in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office. The published version promoted the labour-market case for immigration but Mr Neather said unpublished versions contained additional reasons. 'Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

'I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.' The 'deliberate policy', from late 2000 until 'at least February last year', when the new points-based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said. Mr Neather defended the policy, saying mass immigration has 'enriched' Britain and made London a more attractive and cosmopolitan place.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think tank, said: 'Now at least the truth is out, and it's dynamite. Many have long suspected that mass immigration under Labour was not just a cock-up but a conspiracy. They were right. 'This Government has admitted three million immigrants for cynical political reasons concealed by dodgy economic camouflage.'

The chairmen of the cross-party Group for Balanced Migration, MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, said: 'We welcome this statement which the whole country knows to be true. 'It is the first beam of truth that has officially been shone on the immigration issue in Britain.'

SOURCE



A Keystone Kops operation by Britain's would-be Gestapo

The London Metropolitan Police are the same lot who shot and killed an innocent Brazilian electrician without warning and with no good cause. Their latest caper: Without any prior warning or effort to obtain voluntary co-operation, they smashed their way into thousands of safety deposit boxes on the grounds that the boxes were suspected of containing the proceeds of crime -- but 90% of the contents were in fact legitimate. Getting the cops to admit that has been uphill but they are now in deep trouble. They made a mockery of the law and blatantly breached the legal rights of the box owners. And it seems that some officers even pocketed valuables from the boxes! A really charming lot! They have all the respect for individual liberties that their Leftist political masters do: precious little. Some excerpts below

The police rolled through London in a convoy: scores of patrol cars, armed-response vehicles, outriders on their bikes, vans with their windows shielded by metal cages. With a Met film unit recording everything, detectives forced their way past startled security guards, demanding receptionists open the secure doors that led to the normally hushed strong rooms, which in the three centres housed 6,717 safety deposit boxes.

Investigators wearing gas masks and blue overhauls used power tools to chop away at the locked doors that protected the boxes themselves. They had rehearsed this bit for many hours, on mockups, trying numerous methods to get quickly and safely at the deposit boxes. Diamond drill bits forced down into the locks proved disastrous, potentially damaging evidence inside. Instead, they settled on Makita angle grinders, with which they now effortlessly hacked at the hinges, allowing them to slide out the individual strong boxes.

The vast majority of those caught up in the raids were innocent. They have had their lives turned upside down over the past 17 months. Many have struggled to recoup their money and possessions, been forced into legal trench warfare with police lawyers and told they must prove how they came by the contents of their boxes. This is also a story told through secret legal papers, including confidentiality agreements struck with some vault depositors whose cases threatened to topple the entire operation.

Although the police told a judge that 'nine out of ten' of all of the thousands of box-holders were probably criminally minded, criminally connected or felons, the paper trail reveals that perhaps only as few as ten per cent of the boxes have any connection to serious crime. More worryingly, according to eminent lawyers and barristers, Operation Rize has seen the Yard employ unethical tactics, driving a coach and horses through the new POCA legislation, leaving the Met facing a raft of legal actions that could potentially cost taxpayers millions of pounds.

Within days of the raids, the police set up a helpline to deal with potential inquiries. They were overwhelmed by the response. One detective told Live: 'Everyone presumed we had bagged a load of villains who would not dare claim their iffy property. But thousands of the box-holders complained.'

Many of the clientele were families who had fled turmoil, pogroms, coups and wars and long had a cultural preference for locking away money and jewels, building up a vehement distrust for the integrity of traditional banks. One survivor of Nazi Germany in his seventies told us how he had placed a bag of diamonds there - security if ever he or his descendents needed to run again.

Under POCA, the burden of proof lay with the box-holders. Finding evidence for wartime treks across Europe, or charting migration stories from the Partition of India and beyond, would cost many of the box-holders tens of thousands of pounds. Mark Richardson, a former military intelligence officer and now a forensic accountant, who has been employed by several box-holders to explain their wealth, told us: 'We had to get one family's diamonds carbon-dated at great expense to demonstrate to the police that they had been cut in the Thirties, which tallied with their story of fleeing Germany before World War II.'

Lawyer Sara Teasdale, of City practice Roiter Zucker, whose client had kept more than £900,000 in his box at the vaults in Edgware as cash flow for his business leasing black cabs, said: 'The police are "deep-pocketing" - hauling people through a protracted legal process that they know is so costly that most will roll over.'

Within weeks of Operation Rize, Temerko's team set about applying for a Judicial Review of the judge's decision to grant the controversial Rize warrant and demanded the return of Temerko's files, which they claimed had been taken unlawfully.

Montgomery and Burton highlighted case law that specifically stipulated 'fishing expeditions' were barred to the police, even under POCA. In other words, the police were not allowed to seize property in the hope that it would later prove to be criminal. The legal team also demanded sight of the police evidence that had convinced the judge to issue the warrant in the first place.

Following seven months of legal fencing, with the police guarding its Rize file, the twin Judicial Reviews finally succeeded in prising from the Yard a startling 32-page 'skeleton discussion'. This document - which we were able to obtain after being given a case number by a senior source in Customs and then trawling through court records at the Royal Court building - provides an extraordinary insight into how the police managed to obtain a warrant for Rize.

The Met hired Kennedy Talbot, one of Britain's most experienced barristers dealing with POCA. Talbot approached a senior judge at Southwark Crown Court in November 2007. But Southwark rejected the request. The police application was also riddled with simple errors, according to the skeleton document, including a claim by undercover officers that there were 18,000 boxes, three times the actual number.

Undaunted, the Rize team tried again the following year. This time the Met went out of London to a court that rarely heard complicated money-laundering cases, putting their arguments before Judge Ken Macrae, in Croydon. In a practice known as 'judge shopping', one that is lambasted by judges and lawyers - though not illegal - the police hoped to get the right result by finding a court more sympathetic to their goals and less up to speed with judicial debates on the proportionality of a warrant.

'The warrant was extraordinarily broad,' Temerko's team warned, and 'completely unprecedented', representing the widest ever seen by lawyers in Britain, one that on this ground alone was liable to be quashed by High Court judges. The police had only provided the court with 'bare assertions' rather than hard evidence. A High Court judge was advised, 'The gross interference in privacy outweighed any benefit to the investigation.'

The file concludes: 'This is a remarkable and untenable case of guilt by association' that trampled on rights to privacy enshrined by Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights. This guarantees all individuals the right to privacy, barring states from intruding unless serious crimes have been committed.

Siobhan Egan from lawyers Lewis Nedas added: 'The police had also made some bizarre errors.' The POCA legislation barred the seizing of legal papers but they had five crates belonging to Temerko.

The police changed course. They notified Temerko's legal team that they were now acting under the Criminal Justice and Police Act, which allowed such privileged documents to be held.

'However, this law can only be invoked when a written notice has been given to everyone, box-holders and vault owners,' said Egan. Alerted, the police ran around serving the directors of the Park Lane vault and their box-holders with written notices - without realising that the law could not be applied retrospectively, and that the notice had to be handed over 'at the time' of the raids.

On June 4 2009, the Met caved in. Temerko was offered an agreement. In exchange for dropping his Judicial Review, all five crates of his documents were returned 'in sealed police evidence bags', with the police even agreeing to pay his costs, as well as accounting for their own, a combined figure estimated at more than £250,000. In return, the Russian agreed to keep 'the terms of this consent order confidential'. His silence had been assured. The Selts won too. A similar deal was offered to them, their goods returned and costs paid.

Statistics were by now causing the police significant problems. Mark Taylor, a former fraud investigator for HM Customs and Excise, now an associate director of Vantis, an accountancy firm advising families caught up in Operation Rize, kept a tally.

Of the 6,717 boxes targeted by detectives in the biggest raid in the Met's history, just over half were occupied. And of those that were full, 2,838 boxes were now handed back, a figure that represents 80 per cent of the number of boxes seized.

Eight out of ten box owners were provably innocent. Taylor said: 'Of the £53 million in cash that the police took, £20 million has also been given back and £33 million is now being referred to as "under investigation", of which only £2.83 million has been confiscated or forfeited by the courts.'

This figure represents just over five per cent of the total money stored in the vaults, although the Met has 690 ' suspect' boxes that it is still investigating. That means of the total number of boxes, around ten per cent are being probed for villainy, a long way from the nine out of ten cases the Met surmised they would find while wooing Judge Macrae.

Lawyers have seen their Rize cases squeezed and intimidated. Sara Teasdale revealed how the police were first adamant that her client's money was criminal cash, threatening forfeiture, only to try and turn the box-holder's business partner against him, enticing him to wear a wire so as to entrap him into admitting it was also money stolen from his own company.

Teasdale said: 'They first tried "wrong money". Then it was company money. Even when they dropped criminal proceedings against him in February 2009, they inexplicably continued with civil forfeiture proceedings.' The Yard was trying all it could to get the cash. 'They were sitting on almost £1 million, and having referred to my client anonymously in press releases as an example of why they had raided, they needed to win.'

But this case was recently lost by the Met too, leaving the box-holder with £200,000 in fees, money he is now seeking back from the police.

Others going after the Yard include some who claim that money and jewels have gone missing from their boxes. Many have spoken to Live about their plight, although they have asked not to be named because the information is personal. One goldsmith from north London fought for over a year to get his £40,000 cash and valuables back, then claimed it was not all there. He has now filed an official complaint. 'The police kept saying, "Why have you got all this cash?" and I showed them my books.' His premises were raided twice, the second time by 20 officers. 'They found nothing because I had done nothing and eventually this summer, everything was returned to me. But £10,000 was gone - and my wife's diamond earrings.'

The Met has strenuously denied all allegations of theft, pointing out that anyone stealing from the boxes would have been caught on camera since officers videoed the entire operation.

Another box-holder who is alleging theft, a wealthy Russian émigré party-planner from north London, who had £64,000 in cash and £250,000 worth of jewellery, including heirlooms from Russia, successfully challenged the police to produce the video. 'I am meticulous,' she said. 'I have a receipt for everything. When I got my box back, £9,000 cash and some smaller items of jewellery were missing - a gold baby's bracelet and an 18-carat gold ring.'

The initial police footage, she claims, had a time code and showed her box being carried to a table. But then the tape was interrupted and when it restarted the footage was being shot from a new camera, at a different angle and without a time code, with real time having moved on many seconds.

She told Live: 'It only takes seconds for a small envelope of cash or a gold ring to be swiped from the table and into someone's pocket. I was staggered.' After failing to get adequate answers from the Met's own Directorate of Professional Standards, her lawyers have gone to the independent Police Complaints Authority, along with 70 other box-holders.

Facing hefty fees for defending itself before two Judicial Reviews, being pursued for millions of pounds in legal fees by innocent box-holders, and now facing inquiries into theft, the political, judicial and financial costs of the operation are beginning to stack up.

And yet when it first kicked off, one of the things that had endeared Rize to everyone was its revenue-earning capacity, something revealed in a tucked-away minute of the Metropolitan Police Authority from September 2008.

Warning that the police were lagging behind in meeting targets set to seize criminals' assets, it stated: 'To achieve the target a further £36.6 million of assets need to be seized in the remaining nine months.' This was 'a challenging target'. However, 'with the emerging results from Operation Rize, the seizures are likely to make a major contribution toward the final total.'

In fact, the operation may end up costing the taxpayer a fortune. Rize has certainly helped put a number of hard-line criminals behind bars, but at what cost?

More HERE



'Must be able to speak Polish': British factory could face prosecution for breaching equality laws

Presumably many of the employees are Polish so the requirement is essentially no different from a requirement for an educational qualification

A factory which advertised for Polish-speaking workers could face prosecution for breaching race relations laws. The advert for pet food producer Supreme Nutrition Ltd read: 'Factory operative required to work in busy manufacturing plant in Acton, near Sudbury. Must be Polish speaking.' Details of the minimum wage 5.80-an-hour vacancies were displayed at a Jobcentre Plus but were taken down following a flood of complaints in the Suffolk town, where 1,500 are out of work.

The Department for Work and Pensions said it would be investigating whether the firm was guilty of discrimination.

Unemployed carpenter Adam Bull, 26, said: 'It's outrageous. The condition should be that people have to speak English, not Polish. 'I have lived in this area my entire life, so where am I going to learn Polish? It's totally discriminatory.'

Another 32-year-old man, struggling to find work after he was made redundant from his job in the building trade, said: `It doesn't seem right or fair - there are plenty of local people who would be more than willing to fill those jobs. `But they don't stand a chance of being taken on because the only people who speak Polish around here are the Poles who have moved here in recent years.'

The Government Equalities Office said : 'Unless there is a genuine need for a worker to speak a particular language it is against the law to require that they should do so as a condition of employing them.'

Prime Appointments, the recruitment agency appointed to hire staff for Supreme Nutrition, blamed the advert on an inexperienced member of staff.

A DWP spokesman said: `Jobcentres accept more than 10,000 vacancies a day and it we do not have the resources to check every one. `But all employers are required to declare that their vacancy meets all the legal requirements and we will be investigating this case.'

SOURCE



The BBC lynch mob proved BNP leader Nick Griffin’s best recruiters

Nick Griffin’s appearance on BBC television last week ought to have been a triumph for free speech and a disaster for him and his racist views. Unfortunately, one cannot quite say that. It is true that no matter how much Griffin tried to ignore the question or change the subject, in his attempts to present himself as moderate or even reformed, his mask kept slipping; we kept seeing the vicious, smirking face of racism beneath. No reasonable person can deny that, and that much was good.

However, in several important ways the programme was a disgrace and a disaster and I watched it with growing dismay. It cannot be an accident that a YouGov opinion poll carried out the next day found that 22% of voters would consider voting BNP in a local, European or general election. This is a result, I am convinced, not of giving Griffin the oxygen of publicity but, on the contrary, of trying very publicly to stifle him.

The immense value of freedom of speech is partly that it enables reasonable people to expose through open argument what is wrong with the views of unreasonable or wicked people. It also enables individuals who are perhaps being tyrannised by the majority to defend their views rationally, without being howled down or shut up. It was a triumph for free speech in this sense that the BBC allowed Griffin’s views to be tested by open debate on television. But what happened on Question Time on Thursday fell disgracefully short of this ideal.

Griffin was tormented like a crazed bull in a bullring. The studio audience was almost entirely hostile, hurling banderillas of rage and contempt at him, and most of the panellists felt obliged to wear their indignation ostentatiously on their sleeves. The scrupulous manner of David Dimbleby, the chairman, was an honourable exception to this unpleasant form of emotional grandstanding, and so was the calm good sense of Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservative peer, but otherwise Griffin was thrown to a sanctimonious mob. To see a man savaged by mass emotion is an ugly sight, however bad he may be.

There were some very good and sharp questions from the floor, admittedly, but there were also many that were just expressions of personal contempt, a few so extreme that I am surprised the BBC allowed them. Yet the whole point of the exercise, surely, was to press him into saying what he really thinks, so we could judge it, rather than to keep hearing anguished cries against racism with which we already sympathised. Imagine — because it is essential to freedom to remember the reverse case — if Griffin were a refusenik in a totalitarian state, publicly abused in a humiliating show trial. Wouldn’t we be outraged by the spectacle?

What happened on Question Time was not rational debate. It was argument by emotion, argument by abuse. It was the very opposite of free speech. At times the show was truly infantile, with people interrupting each other in their frenzy. Dimbleby himself protested against it at one point. It struck me at the time as an emotional lynching. Griffin has since used the word, with some reason, and says he intends to take legal action. And while a man who, like Griffin, has chosen to associate with a top Ku Klux Klan leader has little right to object to lynching, the point is not about him. It is about us. We should not let ourselves become a lynch mob.

What happened on Question Time has most certainly given comfort to the enemy that is the British National party and to those tempted to join. They are now entitled to say that their man was set up and psychologically abused by the liberal establishment and by a chosen multi-ethnic studio audience. Sure enough, the BNP claims it has received thousands of new applications for membership — not, in my view, as a result of the BBC giving Griffin airtime, but as a result of the disgraceful treatment he received.

What this episode points up is the debasement of public debate everywhere. Question Time has been degenerating in recent years, like other chat shows, into an irritating cacophony of voices, an emotional gabfest. Dimbleby, his brother Jonathan Dimbleby, Nicky Campbell and other leading media figures are more than capable of running a disciplined and rational show — but this is not what the media masters think the public wants. They think the public wants tears and trembling and blood on the wall, metaphorically speaking, and I am afraid they may well be right.

That is what explains that rapid growth of the studio audience, who are not there to argue but to emote; emotion means better ratings and it has also come to suggest greater authenticity.

What Griffin’s Question Time also showed was, for lack of a better word, the pusillanimous political correctness of the BBC and its lack of moral courage — something not peculiar to it, but characteristic of most public debate today. Deciding to involve a studio audience and then rigging it, to get the sort of response that’s felt to be right, is a form of moral cowardice and it happens all the time.

The BBC should not have chosen an audience that was so deeply hostile to Griffin. The point of that can only have been an attempt to prove its non-racist credentials and must have been a red rag to any BNP sympathiser.

And why on earth would one choose politicians to debate with Griffin? Politicians have their own public relations agenda, obviously enough, as Jack Straw’s shameful and repeated evasions about immigration so damningly proved. Emotional point-scoring for that agenda will obviously be more important to most politicians than plain truth-telling, as Straw also proved.

The justice secretary kept trying to evade the urgent immigration question from the floor just as disgracefully as Griffin kept trying to evade the racism question. And, finally, it was quite astonishing, in an important and contentious national event of this kind, to choose a panellist who doesn’t seem to represent anything British very much, although she was naturalised in 1997.

What was the point of having the American-born-and-raised writer Bonnie Greer? Actually we can guess, I regret to say, and the point will not be lost upon the BNP. She was there to be black and to emote against Griffin, which she did with an offensively silly flamboyance. To abandon reason and to adopt emotion in attacking the BNP will be entirely counterproductive, as we can already see. The sleep of reason breeds monsters.

SOURCE



The trouble with unions: "The underlying trouble with unionization is its ability to capture government, particulary when that industry is so protectected by the government. Ironically many on the left - often quite rightly - disparage the relationship between big business and government, but they also need to accept that many unions behave no better. The problem in both instances is not the survival and expansionist interests of business and unions, but the power of the government to regulate and discriminate."

And the worst airport in the world is in Delhi? No: In London: "Heathrow airport has again been voted the worst airport in the world, according to a global poll of airline passengers. The survey of members of Priority Pass, the world's leading independent airport lounge programme, included responses from 160 countries. The respondents to the annual survey have taken, on average, 17 flights in the past year. It is a repeat of last year's result when Heathrow was still recovering from the ill-fated opening of Terminal 5, which saw passengers suffer lengthy flight delays and large numbers of lost bags. “We are working very hard to make every passenger's journey to or from better than the last one, and these figures demonstrate the we are making good progress,” said the airport's chief operating office Mike Brown. “However, the challenge is continuously to raise standards and through our long-term investment strategy, which sees £1 billion spent on facilities and services every year, we are rebuilding an airport of which the UK can be rightly proud." Charles de Gaulle airport, in Paris, was voted second worst, followed by Los Angeles, Frankfurt International and Miami International. Singapore Changi, a perennial favourite, finished top, followed closely by Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok. Amsterdam Schiphol was the pick of Europe's airports."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc. He has a lot to say this time about the appearance of the British National Party on BBC TV.





25 October, 2009

British police choose to ignore thousands of violent crimes

But they will prosecute you for throwing a hamburger in the garbage

The plight of battered wives and other incidences of violence are being ignored by police, a report said yesterday. A third of the violent offences which were not recorded as crimes should have been. An inspection of how police forces record violence showed that officers are deciding that thousands of violent incidents are not crimes.

Denis O’Connor, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, suggested that the drive to meet government targets could be one reason why officers were failing to record offences. If the findings of the inspectorate, based on a sample of 479 cases, are repeated across all forces, it would mean that at least 5,000 offences of violence and their victims are being ignored. Mr O’Connor said that the findings were a “matter of concern” and David Hanson, the policing minister, described such decisions by police as unacceptable.

Among the cases was that of one force which recorded that “no crime” had taken place when a woman’s partner slapped her, grabbed her by the neck and threw her on the floor, leaving her battered and bruised. The officers wrote that the victim would say that she had injured herself and that her partner’s account was “more accurate”. Mr O’Connor’s report said that the incident should have been recorded as actual bodily harm.

The decision to categorise some violent offences as “no crime” is said to disguise the real extent of violence in England and Wales. It also affects the assistance given to victims of attacks.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary is to begin a wider investigation next year to establish whether the findings have wider national implications.

Mr O’Connor said it was possible that government targets were giving police forces incentives not to record crimes fully. “There are some fairly well rehearsed perverse incentives around targets and ‘no crimes’ is one of those potentially,” he said. He added: “It’s a very high error rate on a small sample. For us as the regulator, it’s a matter of concern.”

In another incident, a man was knocked to the ground by a blow behind his ear. He was then kicked in the body. He needed six stitches in his head. The officer said he found the circumstances unusual and that the man might have been under the influence of alcohol when he fell. Mr O’Connor’s report said the incident should have been recorded as grievous bodily harm.

The report found that 36 per cent of 479 “no crime” decisions were wrong. One in 20 should have been recorded as a serious violent crime and and a third as a less serious assault.

Mr Hanson said the Government was committed to the integrity of crime statistics and that ministers expected crime to be tackled. “The report shows the majority of forces are performing well when classifying violent crime, but there are some issues that give cause for concern, especially around the way the police handle incidents which are reported as crimes, but later downgraded to ‘no crime’,” he said.

Chris Grayling, Shadow Home Secretary, said: “All of this just further undermines confidence in the crime figures and in the criminal justice system.”

The report also called for ministers to review the 150-year-old Offences Against the Person Act, under which assault is prosecuted. The current division of assault into many categories, such as grievous bodily harm and actual bodily harm, is difficult for both officers and the public to understand, it said. Inspectors said it could be redrawn to include simple assault and assault with injury, which would be better understood by the public.

SOURCE



Why sacrifice free speech to swat a gnat?

In the face of a rag-tag party with a dishcloth of a manifesto, we flinched — yes, flinched — in our commitment to liberty

by Matthew Parris

Yesterday was different. It was the morning after the Question Time appearance of the leader of the gay-hating, immigrant-baiting British National Party, and a significant test of our national commitment to the foundation of freedom: free speech. So I had laid out many of the day’s papers: a mosaic of news and commentary. Stepping back, what made tears well to my eyes was the overall picture into which this mosaic resolved itself. Most were hedging. Everyone sounded nervous.

I saw an entire national intelligentsia, in a time of relative peace and stability, unthreatened by any serious challenge to the values they hold dear, and in the face of no more than a gnat of a man leading no more than a rag-tag party with no more than a dishcloth of a manifesto, flinch — seriously flinch — in its commitment to free speech.

On the one hand this, and on the other that; six of this . . . ; finely balanced judgments; agonies of indecision; reluctant conclusions; “I’m all for free speech, BUT . . .”; Jesuitical distinctions between censorship and the denial of a platform; quibbling over format . . . almost every voice sounding nervous, agonised; every judgment, when finally reached, offering first a frightened little curtsey at the throne of An Awfully Difficult Decision.

Was it? Really? Wasn’t this, rather, an absolutely obvious, straightfoward, open-and-shut case? Was there nobody to restate, with the relaxed confidence that philosophical certitude should bring, the only available position for a modern British liberal: that this is a free country in which a range of highly diverse opinions may be held and, if held, published, subject to the law? Full stop. Yes, full stop; for heaven’s sake, full stop.

I ploughed on through newsprint, resting finally on a fresh cause for dismay. Jan Moir in the Daily Mail has felt forced to recant.

Last week the columnist wrote a hurtful article in a sharp and lively style (when does a week pass in which we do not read half a dozen such?) that nastily insinuated that the late Stephen Gately (the gay boy-band singer who died mysteriously in Majorca, after a night’s clubbing) led a sleazier life than his sweet-faced image suggested, and that this told us something about civil partnerships. An unpleasant mixture of speculation and nonsense, of course, but it went with the grain of what some think, and against the grain of what others think, and struck me as publishable.

I realise that such journalism can fan hatreds, even violence, just as I acknowledge (the pro-censorship brigade are right in this) that offering a platform to the BNP may give the party a boost. Nor do practical liberals like me believe in free speech regardless of its effect; they would not support free speech if they expected it to lead permanently to great harm.

But nor do they believe in free speech only when confident that their preferred opinion will win the immediate argument. They know that free speech can help bad ideas to gain ground as well as good. But they have enough faith in the persistence of human reason to believe that in the ebb and flow of argument, and over time, the better argument will eventually prevail.

And — crucially — they believe that free speech will strengthen and sharpen the critical faculties of the whole citizenry, producing a society less susceptible to herd mentality. In short, they do not deny that free speech can hurt, but believe that in time it makes a people stronger.

Moir’s column, however, had provoked a deluge of complaint from people calling themselves progressive. The Mail had been failing to defend Moir. In fact, hardly anyone (but me) had been defending Moir. And her stomach-churning apology yesterday bore the hallmarks more of fear than of repentance. Sad.

SOURCE



More horrors from vindictive British social workers

They LOATHE middle-class people. They have been taught to do so in their Marxist-dominated social work courses

In an inn on the banks of the Firth of Clyde, with the lights of the Kintyre peninsula twinkling on the water, a small group of friends is gathering. Middle-aged, smartly dressed and chatting over ginger beer, they blend in seamlessly with the post-work pub-goers in the town of Helensburgh. But these friends are united by every parent's darkest nightmare. All have come terrifyingly close to having their children removed by the state.

George and Liz McCulloch committed one simple crime in the eyes of the authorities. They fought for a better standard of education for their disabled daughter; it was behaviour that Argyll and Bute Council called "emotional abuse". Their friends, Janice and Rory McCulloch (no relation), are well placed to sympathise, having fought off proceedings to take their own daughter into care five years ago during a disagreement with her school.

These friends are part of a growing network of parents across Britain who have faced losing their children after challenging the judgment of doctors, teachers or social workers. John Hemming MP, co-ordinator of the Justice for Families campaign, warned last month that child protection proceedings are being used as a punishment for "uppity parents".

Jean Robinson, of the Association for Improvements in Maternity Services, confirms that "parents who question or criticise professionals about their child's care risk being referred to social services for investigation".

Child protection referrals have rocketed in the wake of the tragic death of Baby Peter, and figures published yesterday by Cafcass, the organisation that represents children in the family courts, show applications to take children into state care have risen by more than 47 per cent since last year.

Although partly a product of over-caution by professionals terrified of making another fatal mistake, this disturbing heavy-handedness seems to spring, in some cases, from an authoritarian vindictiveness almost too Orwellian to be believed. But I have spoken to eight law-abiding, professional families, with a passionate interest in their children's lives, whose stories of abuse by the authorities are far more chilling than fiction.

George, 49, a team manager for Scottish Gas, is a large, gentle man. His 50-year-old wife, Liz, has a warm smile and sparkling green eyes. Their troubles began in 2005 when they made a request to have their visually impaired daughter Emily, then 12, moved from a local school, where she was bullied, under-performing and miserable, to the Royal Blind School in Edinburgh.

The local authority rejected the request, which would have cost œ34,705 a year, both at the initial stage and at appeal. Undeterred, the couple started court proceedings to demand their statutory right, under the Scottish Education Act 2004, to have Emily moved to a school that met her special educational needs. "I told them face to face, we're taking this all the way because we want the very best for our daughter," says George. It was then that things turned sour. Through a data protection request to the local authority, the couple discovered minutes to a series of secret child-protection meetings at which they had been accused of emotionally abusing Emily by persisting with the placing request. "I was almost sick when I read what they had said about us," says Liz. "We felt like a half-cocked pea shooter against a canon because they were all colluding against us."

With the accusation in the open, social services called George and Liz to a meeting in February 2007 at which, they say, they were told that they would be taken to the Children's Reporter, who decides whether to start care proceedings against abusive parents, unless they abandoned the request. 'Liz was unable to speak she was so upset," says George. "But I told them this was fascist behaviour and they wouldn't get away with it. I said my father fought in the war so we could have freedom and you're threatening us to try to stop us exercising Emily's statutory right. You're abusing a good family for the sake of money."

After the local MSP, Jackie Baillie, took up the family's cause, proceedings were eventually put on hold, allowing George and Liz to pursue their court case, which they won in May last year. Sheriff Valerie Johnston ordered Argyll and Bute Council to send Emily to the Royal Blind School and pay the McCullochs' legal costs, noting that "a great deal of distress" had been caused to the family. The council refused to comment on the case.

Emily started her new education in September 2008, three years after the placing request was first made. "My new school is really nice," she says. "At my old school, I thought I was a bit worthless, but now I know I'm not because I can actually do things." She is a now a bold, articulate girl of 16, but her eyes fill with tears when we talk about her parents' battle with the authorities. "I was heartbroken to see what they were doing to my mum and dad," she says. "I used to cry about it every night because I didn't want them to be called abusers - they are the best mum and dad in the world."

The McCullochs' case is not unusual. All over Britain there are similar stories. Sarah Langton* tells me hers on a bright autumn morning at her home in the south of England. Her eight and 11-year-old sons are playing happily in the next room, but she lives every day with the fear that she will lose them. "I'm worried social services will find out I've spoken about what happened and make our lives hell," she says, her voice trembling. The 47-year-old is a softly spoken stay-at-home mother who suffered severe post-natal depression after the birth of her sons. Her husband Philip*, 50, an electronics engineer, sought help from social services, but the couple soon became uncomfortable about inaccuracies in the records of their meetings that looked like attempts cast them in a negative light.

Sarah recovered and was signed off in 2003, but the couple continued to feel anxious and eventually approached their MP for advice. He contacted the local authority to ask if the records could be amended, and within days Sarah received a telephone call to say the family was under investigation. "They said it was because our complaint showed there was anger in the family, which is bad for the children," says Sarah.

The investigation lasted three months, in which time the boys were repeatedly interviewed by social workers, who eventually concluded that there was "no cause for concern". The inaccurate records were never addressed. "It's shocking that however much you love your children, there is a greater power that can threaten to take them away for no reason," says Sarah.

Kylie Thompson*, 24, knows how it feels to live in the shadow of that power. She tells me from her home in Yorkshire how her troubles began in 2007, when she took her two-year-old son to hospital to check a small red mark on his cheek. The paediatrician who examined him reported the family to social services in case it was caused by a "non-accidental injury". The social workers who first came to assess the family saw at once that there was no cause for concern, and told Kylie not to worry. But, thinking the risk to her children had passed, she made the critical mistake of complaining about the paediatrician.

"Immediately after I complained, he changed his report and said it was definitely a non-accidental injury, rather than just a possibility," says Kylie. "He said it looked like it was caused by an adult grabbing my son's face and striking him a hard blow." Because of the altered diagnosis, social services were obliged to launch an investigation, and Kylie was questioned by the police. Her son and daughter, then three, were placed on the child protection register, and the family were repeatedly visited by social workers scrutinising the children for signs of abuse.

The nightmare finally ended last February, a year after the paediatrician changed his diagnosis, when the children were removed from the register. "Even now, I'm terrified of my son getting a bruise or a cut and not being able to explain it," says Kylie. "It could all happen again."

Social work managers admit that overworked staff, who encounter aggression and abuse every day, can become vindictive without careful supervision and support. Even Kim Bromley-Derry, the chairman of the Association of Directors of Children's Services, confesses that the phenomenon is "obviously not uncommon". "Ultimately, if there is a difference of opinion between a family and a social worker, who are all the other professionals going to believe? Inevitably, the family are in a much weaker position, and we have to prevent all abuses of that power imbalance," he says.

Mr Bromley-Derry urges social work managers to ensure staff are rigorously supervised and says parents should be offered an independent second opinion in cases of disagreement. His suggestion is echoed by John Hemming MP, who wants to see the right to a second opinion enshrined in the Family Courts.

There is no doubt that child protection professionals provide a crucial safety net for society's most vulnerable children. But when their attention is misdirected, they possess the power to destroy happy, loving families. Jack Frost, who fought off attempts to remove his daughter after he complained about a paediatrician, sums up the horror. "You simply cannot imagine how it feels to look at your beautiful daughter every day and prepare yourself to have to say farewell to her forever."

SOURCE



One British school takes a stand against medieval ignorance

Muslim student, 18, banned from college because she refuses to remove her burkha

A Muslim student has been banned from enrolling at a college because she refused to remove her burkha. Shawana Bilqes, 18, wanted to wear the garment - which covers her body and face, leaving only her eyes visible - during lessons. But staff at Burnley College refused to enrol her, claiming the burkha was a barrier to 'safety and communication'. In a strongly worded statement, the college said 'unimpeded' face to face contact between teachers and students was vital.

Miss Bilqes, who wanted to study an access course for a diploma, has now been forced to abandon her plans and is looking elsewhere to complete her studies. Yesterday she said: 'It is my choice to wear the veil. 'I live around the corner from the college in an area where there are so many practising Muslims. 'I tried to compromise but they wouldn't. The college sent me a letter to say I could continue with my course if I stopped wearing the veil. 'We are in the 21st century and we get people from all walks of life. I'm in the police cadets as well and yet it's not a problem wearing the veil there.'

John Smith, principal of the college, in Burnley, defended the actions of his staff. He said that a student's face must be fully visible to maintain high standards of teaching between staff and pupils, adding that it was crucial to wear photo ID around the campus for security reasons. 'We do require all students of Burnley College to have their faces visible when at the college,' he said.

'We are determined to maintain the highest standards of teaching and learning. To do this effectively requires unimpeded communication from the teacher to all students, from the students to the teacher and between student and student. 'It is not possible to maintain this essential full communication if the face of any student is not fully visible.

'We are also determined to provide a safe environment for all our students. Central to this is that all members of the college community should be identifiable at all times. 'To this end we require students and staff to wear a security card which displays their photograph. 'Where individuals decline to comply, then I am afraid we cannot accommodate them.'

Controversy over the burkha was highlighted by Justice Secretary Jack Straw in 2006, when he suggested that Muslim women should abandon wearing it because it was a 'visible statement of separation and difference'. Mr Straw, then the Leader of the House of Commons, faced criticism from Muslim groups after disclosing that he asked women to remove their veils at meetings in his constituency office in Blackburn.

In March 2005, Shabina Begum, 16, controversially won the right to wear head-to-toe Islamic dress in the classroom. She argued that Denbigh High School in Luton breached her human rights by sending her home when she arrived wearing a burkha. After a case costing taxpayers £70,000, three Appeal Court judges ruled the teenager's school had acted unlawfully.

Earlier this year French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke out, claiming the burkha reduced women to servitude and undermined their dignity. 'It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic,' he said. Islamic headscarves have been banned in French state schools since 2004.

SOURCE



Government Health Care Adds Insult to Injury

In 1997, Brian Booy of Bristol in the United Kingdom was diagnosed with angina, a chest pain caused by coronary heart disease, and was told he needed triple bypass surgery. Unfortunately, he made the grave mistake of getting ill in Great Britain, where government management of the health industry contributes to massive shortages of everything from doctors to hospital beds and vaccines. Mr. Booy waited a year and a half for his life-saving surgery, which he never received; he died of a massive heart attack in January of 1999.

His is just one of the many heartbreaking stories featured in "Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care," by Amy Ridenour and Ryan Balis at The National Center For Public Policy Research. Mr. Booy's case is no anomaly: According to the BBC, Dr. Peter Wilde, clinical director for the Bristol Royal Infirmary's cardiac unit, admitted that same year that "10 patients may have died because they had to wait too long for operations."

Long waits and shortages result from government control of the health sector. There are only so many hospitals, only so many doctors. When government promises that everyone will be treated (ostensibly) gratis, it does not simultaneously conjure more doctors into existence. Instead, doctors face more patients, who are now likely to seek treatment more often because they perceive it to be free. The result is long lines, long waits, substandard care.

But it's worse than that. Not only does the socialization of medicine fail to produce more doctors, it actually shrinks the pool. In our free-market system, being a good doctor can be financially rewarding. This matters, because becoming a good doctor is a long, arduous, expensive proposition. Remove the profit incentive and you are guaranteed to have fewer doctors.

The free market has been good to our doctors: General practitioners in the U.S. have almost twice the average monthly net income as their counterparts in Britain's National Health Service, according to worldsalaries.org. Unfortunately, American doctors see in Britain their future under ObamaCare: increased regulation and taxation coupled with decreased earnings. They are deciding en masse that it may not be worth it: A September 2009 Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll of practicing physicians found that "hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early" if ObamaCare makes it into law.

Think about that. Obama promises to expand coverage to every American, but no new doctors will be co-created for this enterprise. In fact, many doctors are telling us that they will shutter their doors if ObamaCare is enacted.

But at least your medical care will be "free," under the new regime, just like Brian Booy's was.

And on top of it all, government will also add its standard bureaucratic idiocy and insult to the medical-care mix: One year after Mr. Booy died, his wife Pat received a letter saying that her husband had at last been given an appointment for his surgery.

Proponents of government-run health care will tell you that the free market unfairly rations health care by making it unaffordable to some, and that their solution will fix this gross inequity. But resources are always and everywhere rationed because resources are always and everywhere finite. Government control does not fix this it only makes it worse. Just ask the widow Pat Booy.

SOURCE



UK GOVERNMENT CLIMATE AD IS PROPAGANDA

The government is trying to terrify you. That is the only possible interpretation of its latest television advertising campaign on the supposed dangers of global warming. Whether or not you accept the scientific premises behind the "bedtime story" advert which is now to be investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority after attracting over 350 complaints from the public, there is no question that it is propaganda in the strict technical sense of the word.

That is to say, it is an attempt by the state to manipulate opinion and evoke emotional reactions without offering argument or evidence for its case. It accepts uncritically the most extreme rendition of the anthropogenic global warming narrative as if it were entirely uncontentious and presents it in the most sentimentally evocative possible way (i.e. as a threat to one's own children and to defenceless creatures generally). It uses the techniques once associated with totalitarian societies not to persuade (which is what advertising properly does) but to coerce: to create fear and guilt. And to what purpose? Without offering constructive argument or serious explanation of the options, we can only assume that this is a campaign designed to browbeat the public into accepting any new restrictions or "green" taxes which government may choose to impose. Fortunately, it seems that ordinary people still have the independence of mind to know when they are being bullied.

More HERE





24 October, 2009

British anti-immigrant party finally allowed on BBC TV: Party head uses appearance to attack Muslims and homosexuals



The tyranny of political correctness is so strong in Britain that only someone from the political margins is game to express publicly views that are almost certainly widely held among ordinary British people. There is of course a heavy "spin" put on all media reports of the occasion. See the actual video here, here and here

Mr Griffin said Islam was not compatible with life in Britain, while describing homosexuals as "creepy". However, he admitted sharing a platform with the Ku Klux Klan, which has carried out racist attacks across America's Deep South, and defended leaders in the organisation as "non-violent". The remarks provoked indignation from other members of the BBC panel and hostile parts of the audience, some of whom booed, calling him "a disgrace".

The BNP leader could not explain why he had previously sought to play down the Holocaust and defended his use of Sir Winston Churchill on BNP literature on the basis that his father had fought in the Second World War. He claimed that Churchill would have been a member of the BNP and was "Islamaphobic" by "today's standard". Asked whether he denied that millions of Jews and other minorities had been killed by the Nazis, Mr Griffin would only reply: "I do not have a conviction for Holocaust denial."

He was then chastised by David Dimbleby, the host of the programme, for smiling. The controversial statements were made in response to intense questioning by members of the audience from ethnic minorities. BBC Television Centre in west London came under siege as filming took place, with MPs joining hundreds of protesters behind lines of police. There were six arrests as dozens of protesters attempted to storm the studio. BBC studios in Hull, Scotland and Wales were also targeted by demonstrators. The cost of the police operation was estimated to be more than œ100,000.

The BBC was certain to be questioned over why it allowed Mr Griffin to air such controversial views but executives were hoping that the intensive questioning that he faced would justify their decision to invite him on the Question Time panel for the first time. The BBC, which Mr Griffin denounced on the programme as "ultra-Leftist", had claimed that impartiality rules meant that it had little choice but to invite him on to the programme after the BNP won seats in the European Parliament in elections earlier this year.

He was joined on the panel by Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, Baroness Warsi, the Tory spokesman on community cohesion, Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, and Bonnie Greer, a black American playwright. Mr Griffin was seated next to Miss Greer.

One of the most controversial moments came when Mr Dimbleby asked the BNP leader why he had been pictured with David Duke, the former leader of the Klan. Mr Griffin claimed that parts of the racist group, officially classed as a "hate organisation" in America, were "non-violent". However, he insisted: "I'm not a Nazi and never have been." He claimed that he was "the most loathed man in Britain" among British fascists.

He was questioned over his views on Islam and said it had "good points" but "does not fit in with the fundamental values of British society". He was also attacked for describing white Britons as the "indigenous" population who faced "genocide". We are the Aborigines here, he said.

Amid angry scenes, one Asian member of the audience asked Mr Griffin where he would like him to be sent and then suggested that he himself might find the South Pole a good destination because it was "a colourless landscape".

Mr Griffin boasted to BNP supporters before the programme that he was "relishing" the prospect of "political blood sport". "I will, no doubt, be interrupted, shouted down, slandered, put on the spot, and subjected to a scrutiny that would be a thousand times more intense than anything directed at other panellists," he said. "It will, in other words, be political blood sport. But I am relishing this opportunity." Speaking after filming had finished, Mr Griffin claimed that he had been able to "land some punches".

About one million people voted for the BNP at the European elections, leading to Mr Griffin taking up one of its two seats in the European Parliament. As a result, BBC executives said strict impartiality rules effectively forced them to include the party in Question Time. Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, said the Government should ban the BNP if it felt that Mr Griffin should not have been allowed to take part in the broadcast. "If there is a case for censorship, it should be debated and decided in Parliament," he said. "Political censorship cannot be outsourced to the BBC or anyone else." He said the BNP had "demonstrated a level of support that would normally lead to an occasional invitation to join the panel on Question Time". Politicians from minor parties, including George Galloway, the Respect MP, and Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Green party, regularly appeared on Question Time. Mr Thompson insisted that Mr Griffin had been invited so that the public could challenge his views, rather than any "misguided desire to be controversial".

Speaking before the programme, Gordon Brown said the BNP's appearance was a matter for the BBC and that he was confident that Mr Griffin would be exposed for his "unacceptable" views. "I hope that the exposure of the BNP will make people see what they are really like," the Prime Minister said.

However, there were fears that Mr Griffin's appearance would lead to an increase in support. He had said he was hopeful his party would be propelled into "the big time" as a result of the broadcast and described his appearance on the show as "a milestone in the indomitable march of the British National Party towards saving our country".

Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London and the chairman of Unite Against Fascism, claimed that the broadcast could lead to an increase in racist attacks and views. "For the angry racist it's a trigger that turns into an attack," he said. "We first saw this when Enoch Powell made his Rivers of Blood speech. There was a huge surge of attacks on black conductors on our buses, and that is why I think you apply a different standard to the BNP to those parties that do not legitimise this sort of violence against minorities."

SOURCE



How migrant total jumped by three million under Britain's Labour Party government

The number of migrants who have come to Britain over the past eight years has reached 2.3million, according to a Whitehall estimate. This brings the total to around three million since Labour came to power in 1997. Estimates of the level of immigration were produced to 'fill the gap' left by the Government's unreliable statistics of the past dozen years. The findings were slipped out without notice last month and only revealed yesterday after academics discovered them and reported them to an immigration think-tank.

The figures dwarf ministers' past admissions of migrant numbers and bear out the forecasts of critics who warned that immigration was running dangerously out of control. The report for the Communities and Local Government Department by consultants Oxford Economics said there were 4.3million foreign-born people living in the UK in 2001. That number had risen to 6.6million by last year - just under 11 per cent of the population. Of the 3.5million working migrants, just over two million were in the country before 2004.

Among the 1.5million people who have arrived since 2004, 620,000 are from Poland and other Eastern European countries who joined the EU that year, the report added. Home Office projections issued before the borders were opened said numbers arriving from Eastern Europe would be 13,000 a year. On top of the 2.3million migrants said to have arrived since 2001, it is thought around 700,000 arrived between 1997 and 2000.

Migration information collected by the Office for National Statistics has been discredited since the disastrous national census of 2001 missed a million people. The figures have been based on a small-scale survey of people arriving at air and sea ports. Notes to the latest study say it is 'one of several aiming to fill the gap in migration data'. The Government is currently involved in an expensive effort to find a way to produce accurate figures.

The Migrationwatch think-tank, which drew attention to the Oxford Economics report, said the Government's contempt for public concerns about immigration had boosted the political fortunes of the far Right. Its chairman Sir Andrew Green said: 'It is ironic that this is the week in which the BNP will be represented on Question Time and is an appalling indictment of the way the present Government has handled this sensitive issue. 'Not only have they totally failed to be honest with the British people but have treated their legitimate concerns with ill-concealed contempt. The success of the BNP can be laid firmly at their door.'

Sir Andrew said Migrationwatch predictions in 2002 that immigration was running at the rate of at least two million each decade had been dismissed on the political Left as nasty, muddled, duplicitous and scaremongering. He added: 'It is absolutely essential that the main parties now commit themselves to a very sharp cut in immigration.'

Current projections say numbers in Britain, currently around 61million, will reach 70million by 2029 thanks to continued immigration and high birthrates among migrants. Immigration minister Phil Woolas has said he will not allow migration to push the population that high.

SOURCE



More medical indifference in a British government hospital

Meningitis girl's three-hour wait for drug that could have saved her

A TEENAGE girl dying from meningitis begged and pleaded with nurses to give her antibiotics, an inquest heard. But Melissa Watmough, 17, had to wait nearly three hours for the drugs after arriving by emergency ambulance to the Manchester Royal Infirmary. There was then a delay of almost two hours before she was seen by a doctor and then another hour before she was administered the antibiotics she hoped would save her life.

Melissa's mum Joanne told the inquest: "I might as well have let her stay at home and die quietly. In our view the hospital did not treat her quickly enough. "We believe that if she would have received the appropriate antibiotic treatment earlier in the process she would still be here today. Meningitis is a deadly disease. All the guidance suggests that time is of the essence. "Melissa was becoming very scared and concerned about her health and begged the nurse to give her antibiotics."

Her family are now considering legal action over her treatment.

Carolyn Singleton, Manchester assistant deputy coroner, ruled Melissa died from natural causes. She urged the hospital to discuss the case with her family and said: "Clearly they believe that had antibiotics been administered when she arrived at hospital, she may have had a fighting chance."

Sue Davie, Chief Executive of the Meningitis Trust, said: "Bacterial meningitis and meningococcal septicaemia are medical emergencies and need immediate treatment with antibiotics, together with admission to hospital. Early treatment with antibiotics can have a significant impact on the outcome of bacterial meningitis."

The inquest heard that Melissa, a hairdressing student at Mancat College, was rushed from her home in Abbey Hey, Gorton, to hospital by ambulance after showing all the classic symptoms of meningitis. She died three days later on the day before Christmas Eve last year. Her family are now considering legal action over her treatment.

An inquest heard Melissa woke up feeling unwell on December 20 and later complained of headache, sickness and a high temperature. A rash also developed on her legs. Her mother Joanne, 40, carried out the 'glass test' advised by the Meningitis Trust and the rash did not disappear. She telephoned an out-of-hours medical advice service and suspected meningitis was diagnosed.

The inquest heard that the advice pointed to three 'red flag' signs, meaning Melissa was displaying three recognisable symptoms of meningitis. An ambulance was sent to pick her up immediately and Melissa was taken as an emergency patient to the MRI. The inquest heard that she arrived at the hospital at 7.16pm but nurses downgraded her condition after an initial examination and it was 9pm before she was seen by a doctor. The doctor said he wished to take a blood sample before antibiotics were administered and it was only when her condition worsened that she was given antibiotics at around 10pm. She was transferred to Hope Hospital in Salford and placed on a life support machine but died on December 23.

John Bachelor, a consultant in emergency medicine at the MRI, told the hearing at Manchester Coroner's Court: "She did present with non-specific symptoms and went down hill very rapidly and developed severe complications of the disease. "It can be very difficult to distinguish between other viral infections." He said it was 'not common practice' to 'blindly' give antibiotics until patients were thoroughly examined and blood tests taken. Dr Bachelor said: "It would not have made any difference to the outcome if she would have been given antibiotics on arrival."

A spokesman for Central Manchester University Hospital's NHS Foundation Trust said: "The Trust would like to extend its sincere condolences to Melissa Watmough's family. We are aware that the family still have concerns after the inquest and we would encourage them to contact the Trust to discuss this further."

SOURCE



How crazy Leftist Britain encourages good student behaviour in its schools

Nine-month nightmare for school helper hauled to court after marching yob from class

A classroom assistant accused of assaulting a pupil broke down in tears yesterday as he was cleared at the end of a nine-month nightmare. Mark Ellwood was fingerprinted, held in a cell, and banned from living with his children during the ordeal, which began when he escorted a foulmouthed schoolboy out of a lesson.

The 46-year-old claims he was 'hung out to dry' by the authorities and warned that a climate of fear in schools means pupils are often beyond control and that teachers are too frightened to discipline them. Speaking outside court, Mr Ellwood, a married father of two teenage girls, said: 'Any confidence a teacher may have will have been sapped out of them after what has happened to me. 'On a daily basis, staff are threatened with being stabbed. 'Swearing is endemic; the respect is simply not there and if you pick a pupil up on their language they tell you where to get off. The teachers are scared of the pupils anyway and they know it. 'I lost my job, was removed from my family and faced a criminal conviction, only to be found not guilty. If the power is in favour of the pupil you have not got a hope in hell.'

Mr Ellwood's ordeal began last January, three months after he began work at David Lister School in Hull, which had recently been placed in 'special measures'. As a 'classroom mentor', Mr Ellwood helped deal with children who had been removed from general classes and placed in a special unit because of bad behaviour. The incident occurred when he noticed a 15-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, playing with a mobile phone during an art lesson and still wearing his jacket. When he asked the boy to take his coat off and put away his phone, the 15-year-old responded by threatening to stab him, adding: 'I will have you killed.' The boy, who was taken out of the class, along a corridor and into the car park, then tried to kick Mr Ellwood in the shins.

Hull magistrates heard how the classroom assistant - a former kickboxing champion - responded by skilfully and 'gently' sweeping the boy's legs from under him to prevent any further attack. Although the teenager suffered no injury, a complaint from his mother led to Mr Ellwood being charged weeks later with common assault.

Police revealed the boy had claimed he had been thrown on to the classroom floor. 'This did not happen at all,' Mr Ellwood said. 'The teacher was in the classroom at the time and he denied seeing anything untoward. 'He landed with his back on the floor. It was done gently and he suffered no injury.'

After being charged with assault, social services visited Mr Ellwood's home before ordering him to move out pending an inquiry. He was forced to sleep on a gym floor for two weeks before being allowed to move back into his home. After the verdict was announced, magistrates chairman Christopher Buren told Mr Ellwood to 'forget about this and restart your life'.

The classroom assistant said he is considering his career options. Stuart Todd, David Lister School's new headmaster, said that Mr Ellwood would be 'welcome back' at the school.

SOURCE



British pupils skipped 8 million school days last year

Children skipped more than eight million days of school last year as the truancy rate soared, official figures show.

Pupils in primary and secondary schools in England missed 1.03 per cent of half days in the autumn term last year and the spring term this year due to unauthorised absence. This is up from 0.97 per cent for the same two terms in 2007-08.

It means that almost 64,800 pupils skipped school without permission on a typical day through truancy, family holidays, illness and other reasons. In total, 8.2 million days were lost due to unauthorised absence.

The Schools minister Vernon Coaker said that missing schools without a good reason was "totally unacceptable". The most common reason for absence was illness, accounting for 59.2 per cent of cases.

Absence for family holidays was the second biggest reason, accounting for 9.7 per cent of absent half days; of these almost a fifth (18.6 per cent) were not authorised.

SOURCE



WEATHERING A CLIMATE OF HATE

Poor old Paul Hudson. The inoffensive cheeky chappy, who presents the weather on the BBC in Yorkshire, has found himself a hate object among the fringes of the environmental movement. Hudson's crime? Well, to borrow a phrase, he told "an inconvenient truth" – that global warming has stopped. In an article headlined "Whatever happened to global warming?" on the BBC website, Hudson noted that the warmest year of recent times wasn't 2007 or 2008, but 1998, and global temperatures have not increased at all in the intervening 11 years, despite increasing carbon emissions.

Ignore the provocative headline, for Hudson's piece was, in fact, scrupulously fair. In measured terms, he explored the theories of what could be behind the present period of global cooling, including the ideas of so-called "sceptics", who believe the sun's energy or the oceans' currents, and not man's activities, are primarily responsible for periods of cooling and warming. But he also quoted scientists who reckon the dip in temperatures is just a temporary blip and that man-made global warming will return with a vengeance in the near future.

No one really knows. In climatic terms, a 10-year trend proves nothing –it, as many scientists argue, could be a mere variation on the graph showing an inexorable rise in average temperatures. But interestingly, Hudson pointed out that none of the climate models beloved by meteorologists forecast the present temperature trend. It is sobering to note that environmentalists are demanding that we damage our economy and make the poor poorer on the back of climate models that have been proved, in the short term at least, to be wrong.

But even an ace forecaster like Hudson couldn't have predicted the reaction his article would provoke. It was picked up in the US by the influential Drudge Report website and from there to numerous climate sceptical blogs who gleefully reported on the BBC's U-turn on global warming. This, in turn, caused a hysterical counterblast from those who see global warming as a matter of religious faith, rather than scientific debate. Hudson was denounced as a denier and a heretic. The Guardian demanded to know why the BBC had allowed his article to be published, and the journal Nature was apoplectic with rage.

Hudson's mistake was to concede there were differing views on the climate, for we live in a society where, for the first time in modern history, we are told "the science is settled" and "there is no room for debate". "Sceptic" has become a dirty word – yet the whole basis of modern science is built precisely on scepticism and inquiry by people brave enough to challenge entrenched views. In contrast today, anyone who questions the quasi-religious scientific orthodoxy on global warming will be denounced as not just wrong, but positively evil.

Paul, keep your head down until this storm blows over.

SOURCE



Britain today: "The prospect of an armed police service moved a step closer yesterday when Scotland Yard announced the formation of a new firearms unit that will routinely patrol gun crime hotspots in London. The armed patrols are being deployed after a dramatic rise in gun crime. They will target key areas in North London, where Turkish gangs are engaged in a bloody turf war, and south of the Thames, where gangland shooting incidents have soared. The C019 Proactive Unit will walk estates while some officers will use motorbikes to provide the capability for high-speed pursuit. Scotland Yard said that the armed patrols began in June, on a trial basis, with a team of 21 officers. That number is set to double next month. While national crime figures recorded a 5 per cent drop in firearms offences, and gun crime is down by as much as 27 per cent on Merseyside, London has experienced a 17 per cent rise from 1,484 to 1,737 offences in the 12 months to September. The increase is being driven by a Turkish gang war, which has resulted in three firearms murders since March as two groups, the Tottenham Boys and the Bombacilar, fight for supremacy. In South London there has been a rise in teenage gang shootings." [A Turkish gang war in Britain? If that's not a failure of policy, I would like to know what is]





23 October, 2009

British authorities have lost track of 40,000 rejected migrants

The Home Office has lost track of tens of thousands of migrants who were refused extensions to their visas more than six years ago, it emerged yesterday. Officials have no idea whether the immigrants left the country as required or are still in Britain as illegal migrants. Lin Homer, chief executive of the Border and Immigration Agency, disclosed the latest backlog of immigration cases in a letter to the Commons Home Affairs select committee.

The revelation comes three years after John Reid, then Home Secretary, described the Home Office’s immigration department as “not fit for purpose”. His made his attack over the failure to deport foreign national prisoners after they had served a jail sentence and the backlog of failed ayslum cases. The Agency is currently working its way through a backlog of between 400,000 - 450,000 old asylum cases and is now preparing to start work on the 40,000 backlog of old immigration cases.

“We are also increasingly giving attentions to our older, archived, non asylum cases, where we have dealt with the application, but we have not formal record that the individual has left the country”, Ms Homer said in the letter. Officials in the Agency have started to look through the 40,000 case files to see if the immigrants are still in the country and can be removed.

Ms Homer said most of the files related to cases dating back before 2003 and were immigrants who have been refused an extension to their visa allowing them to remain in the UK. In the letter to Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs select committee, Ms Homer said that the names are to be checked against police records and the anti-terror watchlist to see if any individual is “harmful” to the public.

Critics of the Home Office said the figures disclosed the “utter chaos” in the immigration system.

Ms Homer said in her letter that in some of the old immigration cases further action against the individuals might be possible. “In the last few months we have begun the process of reviewing these files to consider if any further action is necessary or possible. Where further action is required it will be taken and any cases which may be considered as harmful to the public will be prioritised.”

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK said: “Yet another skeleton in the Home Office cupboard. “Tens of thousands of case files lying around and the true situation covered up for years on end. This is symptomatic of the utter chaos in the asylum and immigration system during the past ten years. “Nobody in the private sector would get away with such a performance.”

A Home Office spokesman said the department believed many of the individuals had returned home, been removed or had been allowed to stay in Britain after applying through in another category. The spokesman added: “We expect those that are here illegally to return home. Where they refuse to do so, we will seek to enforce their return.”

SOURCE



British death panel refuses to approve life-extending cancer drug

A drug that can extend the life of women with advanced breast cancer has been turned down for use in the NHS by the cost-effectiveness watchdog. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) said it plans to block use of Tykerb (lapatinib) in the Health Service after a second review. The decision comes despite rule changes brought in to let people at the end of their lives have the chance of new and often expensive treatments. It also puts Britain at loggerheads with much of Europe where the drug is given, in combination with a standard chemotherapy drug called capecitabine.

GlaxoSmithKline, Tykerb’s manufacturer, said the latest appraisal would result in 2,000 British women a year being denied access to the treatment. As well as extending life by weeks or months, it has the additional advantage of being taken in pill form.Campaigners have questioned the decision to refuse it. They said the drug met all three conditions: it is used for patients with less than two years’ life expectancy, offers at least three extra months’ life and is licensed for a small number of patients.

Tykerb is the only drug licensed for women with advanced breast cancer for whom Herceptin is no longer working. However NICE said that at £1,600 a month for each patient, plus the added cost of capecitabine, the treatment did not represent a cost-effective use of resources.

Its complicated quality assessment valued the drug at £59,000 per life year — higher than the £30,000 threshold it normally applies, although no specific limit has been stipulated since the rules for end-of-life drugs changed.Nice concluded that the drug “is not recommended for the routine treatment" of women with advanced breast cancer once Herceptin has failed, although they can be given it in clinical trials. The appraisal is now open to consultation.

The treatment came to public attention after Jane Tomlinson, the charity fundraiser, became one of hundreds of British women to benefit from the programme. She died in 2007 at the age of 43.

Mike Tomlinson, her widower, condemned the ban when it was first proposed earlier this year, saying Nice had failed the “acid test” on being more flexible with life-extending drugs to terminally ill patients.

One of Nice’s reservations concerns the amount of extra life that Tyverb offers women. The evidence from trials suggested they lived for an extra 2.4 months on average. Under the new end-of-life rules, a drug should normally give an extra three months survival.

Gillian Leng, Nice’s deputy chief executive, said: “The appraisal committee considered the updated economic evaluation presented by the manufacturer but was not persuaded that the adjusted estimates of overall survival presented were robust. “The committee therefore concluded lapatinib is not a cost-effective use of NHS resources.”

SOURCE



NHS finally decides to treat the elderly as human beings -- in theory, anyway

Ageism in the NHS, which turns elderly patients into second-class citizens, is to be outlawed. Health Secretary Andy Burnham says all patients - whether 20 or beyond 80 - deserve the same care and attention.

Today's announcement follows alarming new evidence that older people are far less likely to receive a proper diagnosis and essential treatment. Many elderly patients miss out on the scans, drugs and even basic health advice routinely given to the young. Some doctors decide it is simply not worth the bother once patients pass a certain age.

But Mr Burnham told the Daily Mail: 'I have decided it will become illegal for any difference to be made on age grounds. That's quite a big undertaking. 'People in the NHS don't set out to make hard and fast rules that lead to older people getting inferior care. 'But it's perhaps judgments that are made and decisions that are made. 'As we live longer we are having to reassess some of our attitudes to ageing. 'We are saying there shouldn't be an age differential. We should have the highest aspirations for everybody.'

Ministers had been heavily criticised for not including the NHS and social care in the general age discrimination law due to come into force in 2012. But Mr Burnham said the Health Service's own age discrimination ban will now apply at the same time.

Earlier this year, a survey found that almost half of all doctors caring for older patients believe the NHS is 'institutionally ageist'. As many as seven out of ten specialists say the elderly are more likely to struggle to get conditions diagnosed than younger patients. Research suggests two-thirds of those with dementia are never diagnosed - at least in part because their symptoms are dismissed as an inevitable consequence of old age.

Those with easily identifiable conditions fare no better. Younger stroke patients are five times more likely to receive an MRI scan to check for bleeding in the brain than older patients. In other cases, the elderly have not received heart treatments, including clot-busting drugs, that are given to the young without question. There is also enormous concern about poorer provision of mental health services for older patients.

And a study of 9,000 older adults last year - half of whom had serious medical conditions - found many were not getting basic care for conditions such as osteoarthritis, incontinence and osteoporosis.

Ministers initially resisted a blanket ban on NHS age discrimination because of concerns over the cost implications and suggestions it could even have the perverse effect of allowing hospitals to stop some treatments targeted at the elderly alone. Mr Burnham said: 'There has been some progress in improving services for older people. 'But there are some cultural issues that we have to address. The costs are manageable. It's also morally the right thing to do. 'It says something about what kind of country we are, how we look after our oldest people.'

Having NHS age discrimination banned by law means those who believe they are victims will be able to mount challenges in the courts.

Mr Burnham said some NHS services should be exempt from the ban, where there is clear evidence that they need to be targeted at particular age groups. These are likely to include vaccination programmes, screening and IVF treatment. And doctors will still be able to deny treatment on clinical grounds - for instance, if they decide an elderly patient is too frail to safely have surgery.

'The NHS does often provide services on an age basis - a good example being the swine flu vaccine,' he said. 'We do often have recommended age groups and priorities. 'There's flexibility that's needed here so the NHS can target particular groups.

SOURCE



British Boy, 10, dies of meningitis after being wrongly diagnosed with a migraine... despite mother insisting he had killer disease

Careless government doctors looked at only one symptom in complete isolation from the overall condition of the boy. They should be shot

A boy of 10 died from meningitis after doctors wrongly diagnosed a migraine and told his mother to give him calpol, an inquest was told yesterday. William Cressey saw five doctors in three days before finally suffering 'catastrophic' brain damage. His mother, Cheryl, 48, repeatedly told doctors that she suspected meningitis but each time was ignored, she said.

Just hours before he died the schoolboy begged one of those doctors: 'Please help me. I'm going to die.' By then his face was so swollen that he could barely see and he was drifting in and out of consciousness.

Wiping tears from her face Mrs Cressey, a former statistician, told the hearing: 'They wouldn't accept that he had a serious illness. 'They just wouldn't consider meningitis as a possibility. They told me he had a migraine, but he was far too ill for that. 'The deterioration in his health was so sudden and the change so marked that I knew it had to be something very serious. 'I wanted them to investigate and eliminate it as a precaution...but they were adamant that it wasn't meningitis and that was the end of it. 'He was dying and they told me to take him home and stop off at the shops on the way for some calpol.'

The schoolboy fell ill at home in Darlington, County Durham, on Friday, February 25, 2005, the inquest was told. He was complaining of a headache, was feeling sick and had a high temperature. On the Sunday his condition deteriorated and he suddenly 'screamed' out in pain. He put his hands to his head and to the back of his neck and turned 'scarlet red', his mother said.

Miss Cressey, who is divorced from William's father, rang the out of hours GP service and was told to get him to the nearest hospital as soon as possible. She immediately drove to Darlington's Memorial Hospital and was quickly taken into a cubicle within its Accident and Emergncy unit. 'By the time we got there swelling had developed on his face, he was shaking and burning up,' she told the hearing. 'He was sweating, yet his hands and feet were cold. He started complaining of pain in his stomach and legs. 'I told the doctor that I was concerned it was meningitis. I had never seen William become so poorly so quickly.

'The doctor pulled William's pyjama legs up to check for a rash. He told me it wasn't meningitis and that he had a migraine. 'They wouldn't acknowledge that meningitis was a possibility. They dismissed it right from the beginning. 'I asked for blood tests to be carried out and antibiotics to be given to him as a precaution but it was just dismissed. 'The doctor told me to take him home and let him sleep off the migraine.'

Miss Cressey refused to leave and insisted that he be admitted to the children's ward at the hospital. That night his condition worsened. His temperature rose to 38.7C and he began vomiting violently. William was examined by a second doctor who looked at his shins and stomach and said there was no sign of a rash. Miss Cressey again asked for blood tests but was refused. 'She said he had a migraine and that was it,' she told Newcastle Coroners Court.

'The swelling had spread right across his face and his eyes were so swollen that he could hardly blink. 'I kept going back and asking somebody to come and look at him. The nurses wouldn't come. They rolled their eyes at me and turned their backs on me. 'They just didn't want to know.' He was seen by a third doctor on Monday morning but later that day they decided to discharge him.

'I had no choice,' added Miss Cressey, who was refused a second opinion. 'They had decided that he was alright and he was going home and whatever I said they wouldn't change their view. 'I thought (they) were going to help him. I kept going back and asking for somebody to come and look at him. 'I wish I had taken him somewhere else.'

William was discharged but minutes after returning home collapsed. Mrs Cressey returned to the hospital immediately and William was examined by two further doctors. But a few hours later, in the early hours of Tuesday March 1, he suffered a massive seizure which rendered him brain dead.

'I see it every day and every night of my life,' said Miss Cressey. 'I know what they did. They left him until it was too late.' He was transferred to Newcastle General Hospital where further tests confirmed that he was suffering from a rare form of meningitis and would not survive. His heartbroken mother turned off his life support machine.

SOURCE



Insane British police priorities again: Man prosecuted for causing criminal damage to £5 beefburger

But if you are attacked by a youth gang or your car is stolen they are not interested. As we saw yesterday, even an attempted rape does not interest them. Britain has truly become a madhouse under the Labour government. The police and social workers will do anything to attack the middle class while turning a blind eye to ferals. It's pure class hatred

As far as criminal trials go, it was never going to be a whopper. But businessman Stephen Morgan thought he was mince meat when he was hauled to court to be accused of criminal damage - against a beefburger. The 31-year-old had already experienced the indignity of being arrested by four policemen and led away in handcuffs after an argument with a take away delivery driver. And after being grilled by the officers at his home he was forced to spend 22 hours in custody before charges were brought.

Mr Morgan's order for food for himself, his partner and their two children had arrived at their home near Swansea in South Wales, minus two burgers. He complained and was told by staff at Pepino's Pizza parlour in the nearby town of Gorseinon that the missing items would be delivered immediately. But when they failed to arrive, he contacted the take away again to ask for a refund - which he says they agreed to provide. Moments later however, the beefburgers were delivered. But Mr Morgan, who by then had already eaten, demanded £15 compensation instead. This was paid, and the beefburgers were discarded.

But several hours later a four-man police team arrived, arrested him on suspicion of robbery and took him to the cells. His partner Michelle Owen, 30, explained: 'The next morning he was still in custody and we went to the police station to give statements. 'They eventually released him at 7pm that night - it was ridiculous.'

Mr Morgan, of Gorseinon, Swansea, was charged with criminal damage to the two beefburgers. But a brief hearing at Swansea magistrates court yesterday heard the case against security consultant Mr Morgan has now been dropped.

Speaking after the court appearance, which would have cost several thousand pounds, Mr Morgan said: 'I'm just glad sanity has prevailed - it was all a bit silly really. 'I have just started a security business training dogs for the police and the army out in Afghanistan. 'I have had a lot of backing and Government contracts and if I had got a criminal record I would have lost my licence to operate. 'It's just a relief it is all over.'

His solicitor David Singh branded the whole episode 'a waste of public money' after a five-minute hearing at Swansea Magistrates' Court. He said: 'Quite simply this case should never have come to court. It was a waste of public money. 'My client was arrested by four policeman at home and then spent 20 hours in custody being questioned and giving statements. 'There was a brief hearing last week when the case was reviewed and that was re-reviewed at the weekend by lawyers before the case against him was dropped.

'It started off with him being arrested for robbery, from robbery he was charged with criminal damage then they tried to allege a breach of the peace, now it's zero. 'The whole process must have cost a couple of thousand pounds at least, for beefburgers which cost £5.'

Nobody from Pepino's Pizza was available for comment yesterday. But Sinan Boyraz, who runs the takeaway, earlier said customers who receive the wrong order get their money back, plus free food. He said: 'We have a good reputation. Out of 2,000 people who eat here, 1,999 are happy.'

SOURCE



Persistent criminals could escape trial under new British guidelines

The underlying idea is reasonable until you take into account the class bias of the British legal system. This will just make it even easier to ignore repeated offences committed by the underclass. And if you are in that legally privileged group, offences as serious as rape can be dismissed as "minor"

Persistent criminals could escape punishment even when there is overwhelming evidence against them under new plans allowing prosecutors to overlook minor offences, senior lawyers have warned. Hundreds of offenders may escape charges because court action would not be deemed “proportionate” to their crimes, under guidelines that set out the most significant changes to prosecution principles in 90 years.

The proposals are intended to encourage “common sense” to be used in the justice system – for example, forgiving a householder accused of assault when making a citizen’s arrest on a burglar. However senior lawyers said that they could prevent justice being done.

Under current rules, in operation since the 1920s, the Crown Prosecution Service can only consider whether enough evidence has been gathered against an offender and whether court action is in the public interest. However plans contained in an updated code for prosecutors drawn up by Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, introduce a new proportionality test.

The proposals, which could apply to crimes ranging from fraud to theft, shoplifting, minor assault and criminal damage, are designed to balance for the first time the cost and time involved in bringing a prosecution with the seriousness of a crime and the harm it has caused. The changes, which are scheduled to come into force next year, would also allow the CPS to escape criticism for bringing cases against otherwise impeachable characters accused of minor misdemeanours. However, complex fraud trials, which can be extremely long and expensive to pursue could also fall under its scope.

Sources indicated that it was also aimed at cases where a previous offender who had been given a conditional discharge, later stole a small item from a shop. That sort of minor breach would normally trigger an immediate jury trial, costing tens of thousands of pounds. However under the new guidelines, the CPS would be free not to prosecute.

Desmond Browne QC, Chairman of the Bar Council, warned: “A sense of proportion should surely be all part of the decision whether it is in the public interest to prosecute. But where there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest to prosecute, one needs to be very cautious before deciding that prosecution is not a proportionate response to specific offending. The danger in emphasising proportionality is that it could all too easily become a reason for not implementing the law as laid down by Parliament.”

David Davies, the Tory MP who is a member of the Home Affairs selection committee, said the new guidelines in the Crown Prosecution Service consultation paper, were “disgraceful” and amounted to a “criminals’ charter”. “This is another blow for those who believe that criminals should be punished,” he said. "In certain very limited situations, it is right to take into account whether a prosecution is a proportionate response to the specific offending when deciding the most appropriate course of action," the new guidelines state.

Dan Hyde, a criminal lawyer at Cubism Law, said the introduction of the proportionality clause presents an opportunity to avoid wasting resources on spurious trials. "One would hope it might avoid prosecutions which are patently unwarranted and which undermine public confidence in the police and CPS. "They are trying to add a bit of commonsense to the decision making process. There is a ‘touchy-feely’ attitude to the whole thing. “If applied correctly, it could see a situation where you stand back and take a look at it as a particular course of action. "If a lawyer can see there might be public outrage if someone is prosecuted because they have committed a trivial offence, it allows them to say ‘hold on – it is disproportionate to prosecute that person’.”

Recent cases that might never have gone to trial under the new system include that of Renate Bowling, a disabled 71-year-old pensioner who was hauled before the courts and charged with assault after she prodded a teenager in the chest with her finger when stones were thrown at her home. Another is the example of £20,000 of taxpayers’ money being wasted taking a man to court for taking a banana worth 25p during a drunken night out with his friends in Birmingham.

The CPS is now seeking views of lawyers and the public on the new code, which also contains eight new factors on when it will not be in the public interest to bring charges. These include cases where the offender will use a court appearance to repeat views which will cause distress to another section of society, and cases in which prosecutors or police have previously promised an offender that a prosecution would not be brought.

There are two new public interest factors that would make a prosecution more likely. Under one of these, charges will be more likely if the offence has led to complaints from a community, who either live in the same geographical area or share common "characteristics" or interests. This is an attempt to ensure that prosecutors respond effectively to problems such as anti-social behaviour which is disturbing local residents. [Rubbish! It's just an excuse to prosecute disrespect for Islam]

SOURCE



British faith schools are accused of using ‘inflammatory language’

In good politically correct style, observations of Muslim hatred have to be balanced by accusations about Jews. I would like to see examples of the two. I'm betting that there is no comparison

Independent faith schools are using “inflammatory language” and biased material on classroom displays Ofsted warns today. The school inspectors visited 51 private faith schools in England to judge whether they developed children spiritually, culturally and morally. But in eight of the schools they found posters and work on the walls that “had a bias in favour of one group.”

“For example, wording used to describe the situation in Palestine, seen in a Muslim school, used inflammatory language,” the report said. “Similarly, in a Jewish school, pupils' writing used strong language in describing situations in that part of the world.”

Inspectors found some published teaching materials with incorrect information about the beliefs of other religions being used in schools they visited. The report recommends that all resources used to teach about other faiths are accurate and unbiased.

“All the schools emphasised the need for their pupils to respect other people and recognise their freedom of worship, but it was strongly felt that this should remain distinct from any requirement to teach about other faiths in detail,” the inspectors found.

Posters seen by inspectors in one Muslim school referred to the situation in Palestine as an Israeli “occupation” and failed to show the other side of the argument or a balanced viewpoint.

In one Jewish school the language used in children’s work was influenced by events that had happened to their relatives in the Middle East and was highly emotive.

Teaching materials used generalised statements about the beliefs held by other religions and failed to express nuances of belief, inspectors found.

SOURCE



When should children start school?

Children are being attacked from all sides these days. Firstly there is a recommendation that children should not start "formal" education until they are six. As someone who started school at four, I can't imagine waiting so late, but obviously others take a different line.

Dame Gillian Pugh, review author, said, "four and five-year-olds tended to be at a stage where they were just "tuning in" to learning and that they could be "turned off" if they were made to follow too formal a curriculum, too early on." Perhaps, but not for all children. The mandated age for children to enter school is questionable as the parents should decide, an issue Douglas Carswell eloquently puts forward here.

On top of this, or indeed in direct competition to it, the European People's Party believes that children should be given lessons in the benefits of the European Union from the earliest of ages. Of course, some would question how long a lesson it would be.

They claim that, "knowing and understanding, from a young age, the principles, the procedures and the successful history of the European Union, the generations of tomorrow will be immune to any distortion of the perception of the role of the EU and will much better embrace the advantages of this unique project of voluntary sharing of sovereignty." They want to 'instruct' young children in the "benefits" of the EU before they have a chance to formulate their own opinions on the institution.

Clearly both of these examples highlight why government needs to stand aside in the provision of education. The temptation to meddle and mould children's minds to be in sync with the government thinking of the time is too great. Free enterprise in schooling is best for parents, the taxpayer and the children themselves.

SOURCE



Obese mother's baby taken off her by British do-gooders

More evil fallout from a false gospel. Since obesity is basically genetic, the kid will end up fat anyway

A newborn girl was taken into care because it was feared she would pile on excessive weight in the care of her obese parents. The child was removed from her mother within hours of being born earlier this week and has been placed with a foster family. Her parents, who are both clinically obese, have already had two children taken into care amid concerns about the youngsters' weight. They have been warned they risk losing their remaining four children if they too fail to shed pounds.

Before she became pregnant, the mother weighed 23st. [322 lb.] At that time one of her children, a toddler, weighed 4st and her 13-year-old son weighed 16st. [224lb.]

Social workers in Dundee confirmed they took the baby because of fears the infant's weight would balloon. Her devastated mother, who is 40, discharged herself from hospital on Tuesday, a day after the birth. She and her husband, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were warned last year to bring their children's weight down.

Last night a Dundee council spokesman said the decision to take the girl was given 'careful consideration'. She added: 'It is never taken lightly and always at the forefront is what is the best course of action for the welfare and safety of the child or children.'

SOURCE



Vitamin supplements could do more harm than good

At last the word is getting out

People taking high-dose vitamin and mineral supplements may be doing more harm than good, an expert has warned. Professor Martin Wiseman, medical and scientific adviser for the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF), said it was difficult to predict the impact vitamin supplements had on the chances of cutting cancer.

While low dose supplements can be a "valuable safety net", high doses could be harmful. Research over the last few years has suggested some vitamins can actually increase the risk of some cancers. Beta carotene for example can increase the risk of lung cancer in those who already smoke.

"Many people think they can reduce their cancer risk by taking supplements, but the evidence does not support this," Prof Wiseman said. "Just because a dietary pattern that provides a relatively high level of a particular nutrient might protect against cancer, it does not mean that taking it in tablet form will have the same effect. "In fact, at high doses the effect of these micronutrients is unpredictable and can be harmful to health.

"Although there are some studies that have shown a reduction in cancer risk from high-dose supplements, others have not, and these supplements have normally only been tested on a select group of people.

"This means we simply do not know enough about what the effect will be for the general population to confidently predict the balance of risks and benefits. Some people may be doing themselves more harm than good.

"There are also studies that show high doses of some supplements can increase risk of some cancers.''

Prof Wiseman said multivitamins would not contain all the good nutrients found in food, such as fibre adding that the best advice was to have a "health, plant-based diet with lots of fruits and vegetables".

Prof Wiseman's comments echo similar sentiment from Professor Brian Ratcliffe, a leading nutritionist, who last month said Britain's "worried well" were wasting their money and possibly risking their health by taking supplements.

Prof Ratcliffe said multivitamin and mineral supplements were "completely pointless" for the majority of people with a healthy diet and that topping up on vitamins could potentially be dangerous.

SOURCE



British government in the scare business

The Advertising Standards Authority will investigate the Government's £6m TV spine-tingler designed to change our behaviour. 357 complaints have been made to the ASA, a self-regulatory body.

The first tasteless ad features a girl watching a cartoon dog drown, engulfed by a flood - with the advice that only by reducing "everyday things like keeping houses warm and driving cars" can we avert a watery fate for our pets, our children's pets, and our children's pets' children:

Most complaints focus on the fact that it is too terrifying - while others have complained that the scientific evidence doesn't justify the nightmare portrayed, albeit in cartoon form.

Ministers haven't helped in their statements defending the taxpayer-funded ad splurge. Minister Joan Ruddock claimed: "It is consistent with government policy on the issue, which is informed by the latest science and assessments of peer-reviewed, scientific literature made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other international bodies."

But that's not quite true.

In 2007 the IPCC released six scenarios generated from computer models. They projected rises of ranging from 0.18m - 0.38m to 0.26m - 0.58m, depending on how much the climate were to warm. That's barely enough to drown a kitten.

So if it's not rising sea levels, perhaps it's storm surges?

Alas, that's not borne out by the evidence. Southern Hemisphere cyclone energy has fallen to a 30-year low, and the long-term trend shows no significant increase in major hurricane activity, despite a warming period from the mid 1970s to 2000.

Barely a day passes without the climate refusing to conform to the models, and specifically the nightmare predictions they can generate with a crank of a handle. Just yesterday, we reported, dramatic ice loss reported in the Antarctic in 2007 turns out to have been overestimated.

Certainly, there's nothing that remotely justifies the dramatic cartoon disaster. Behaviour change has become an imperative with its own momentum. Much of it depends on huge sums being thrown at the advertising "industry", which is unlikely to bite the hand that feeds it. Think of it as a green jobs bonanza (at your expense).

Maybe Ruddock is thinking of Peerages, rather than Peer Review.

SOURCE



British government climate change figures 'are misleading'

A typical British "fudge". Nobody in the know believes British official statistics any more. They would do Stalin proud

The Government has been accused of exaggerating Britain’s success in fighting climate change by presenting “misleading” figures on carbon emissions. Sir Michael Scholar, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, said that presentation of data by the Department of Energy and Climate Change was “unsatisfactory”. In a letter to Tim Yeo, the chairman of the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, he said that a statistical bulletin released in February “fell short” of the Government’s code of practice.

Sir Michael raised serious concerns about the claim that CO2 emissions had fallen by 12.8 per cent compared with 1990 levels. Nearly a third of that fall is made up of carbon credits purchased by polluters in an EU trading scheme and do not represent actual cuts in UK emissions. Without the credits, the fall is a much more modest 8.5 per cent.

Robin Oakley, head of Greenpeace’s energy and climate campaign, said: “Given that the government is falling short on just about every climate change emissions target going, apart from the pretty low Kyoto one, this really isn’t going to do much for their reputation in this area. "When the public see that emissions figures are going down, they want to be assured that global warming is actually being tackled, not that there’s been some creative accounting going on.”

It is not the first time that ministers have fallen foul of the government watchdog. In October last year, the Home Office was forced to admit that serious violent crime is much worse than they had been claimed because police forces had been failing to record offences properly. And in December Jacqui Smith had to backtrack on an announcement that knife crime had fallen after failing to substantiate it with statistical evidence.

The latest row is damaging for the Government as it casts doubt on whether people can believe official statistics on carbon emissions at a time when ministers are aiming to project an image of the UK as a world leader in the fight against climate change. "The fact that the authority has rapped the department's knuckles is quite a strong censure," said Nigel Hawkes, director of the campaign group Straight Statistics. "You've got Gordon Brown saying 'We've got 50 days to save the world', Ed Milliband appearing at an event at the Science Museum tomorrow. But frankly we're not in a position to lecture people if we're misrepresenting our own achievements"...

SOURCE





22 October, 2009

British police seize flimsy excuses not to investigate a violent attempted rape

Under the influence of their Leftist government, they are on the side of the crooks so it is no surprise. It is only successful rapes that interest them, apparently. If the woman fights off the attacker it's just a yawn. It's everyone for themselves in Britain today. The police are only of use if they are in the mood. They do all they can to fob off complaints. They only thing they take seriously is if you inconvenience a crook when he attacks you. In such cases the crook gets let off and you get prosecuted. Typical Leftist inversion of healthy values



Traumatised by a sex attack in a park, a teenage girl [above] was at least comforted by the likelihood the man would be identified by DNA. Priya Francome-Wood, 17, had kicked and struggled free after he lay on top of her. Police said they were in no doubt she had managed to escape a serious sex attack. They took away her skirt and T-shirt, telling her 'a surprising amount of DNA' can be transferred in such cases. But five days later Miss Francome-Wood's hopes were shattered by a phone call from police in Bournemouth, where she was attacked during a weekend visit to a friend. To her horror, they said they could not justify spending £500 on DNA testing.

Bizarrely, part of the reason was that she had fought the man off. That meant the crime was classed as a simple assault, rather than a sex attack which would have been fully investigated.

Miss Francome-Wood, from Milton Keynes, said she was shocked by the decision. The A-level student added: 'It was the most terrifying thing I have ever gone through. 'I can understand the funding issue but there is still an attacker out there. I am convinced he will do this to another woman - and they may not be as lucky as I was.'

Her father Christopher Wood said: 'We are disappointed and unhappy about this. Priya was told that because it was an assault it didn't warrant doing DNA testing. 'But it was only an assault and not a sexual assault or rape because Priya managed to escape. I know the police have to work within a budget but the fact is there is a dangerous man out there who has done this once and there is nothing to stop him doing it again.'

The 51-year-old IT manager added: 'We were disappointed that the police didn't seem to take it seriously. 'It seems crazy that they are not going to pursue DNA when clearly it could happen to another young woman.'

Since the assault Miss Francome-Wood has suffered a panic attack while walking at night near her family home.

Forensic experts said the cost of testing a DNA sample on a piece of clothing can be as little as £500, but increases depending on the number of samples examined. According to DNA Worldwide, a forensic testing laboratory in Somerset, it costs the police about £2,000 to carry out DNA tests on an item of clothing.

Dorset Police would not comment on funding procedures for DNA testing, but Inspector Mike Claxton of Bournemouth police said: 'The decision to use DNA testing is based upon the seriousness of the crime, together with the probability of a positive result. 'In this case, our forensic officers have advised us that the chances of retrieving a DNA profile of the offender from the victim's clothing - a profile good enough for a national DNA database comparison - were slim to nil. 'This is especially true because this crime was not reported to the police for around 24 hours.'

SOURCE



Parents seek £1m for hammer attack on white son at racist British school

Muslim racism is just fine, apparently, no matter who gets hurt

A white pupil was battered with a hammer at a school where politically correct teachers were afraid to deal with racial tensions, the High Court heard yesterday. Henry Webster, 15, suffered a fractured skull and brain damage after being set upon by a gang of Asian [Muslim] youths. Twelve people were jailed over the 2007 attack, but Mr Webster's parents have now brought a civil action against Ridgeway Foundation School near Swindon. They claim there was a negligent failure to maintain proper discipline and deal with racial tension and are seeking compensation of up to £1million.

The family's lawyers told the court a 'culture of racist bullying and harassment' built up around a 30-strong gang called the 'Asian Invasion'. Teachers were too anxious about being seen as bigoted to intervene, but white pupils were branded 'racist' by the acting headmaster and given harsher punishments.

Robert Glancey, QC, representing the family, said tensions escalated after the July 7 London bombings in 2005 and when more Asian pupils joined the school, some of whom were 'radicalised and hostile'. Racial intimidation and violence became a 'feature of the life of the school' with eruptions of 'extreme acts of violence', it was alleged. Asians were 'encouraged' to separate from white pupils and formed a gang that would laugh at and abuse them. Serious incidents included a riot on the playing field in May 2006, which led to armed police attending the school.

At the same time, white pupils received unfair treatment, the court was told. One boy was disciplined for wearing an England shirt. Mr Glancey said: 'There were a large number of incidents, events, complaints and warnings which would or should have made any school which was being reasonably competent realise there was a serious problem with racism, violence security, discipline and misbehaviour.'

Mr Webster was attacked after being told an Asian youth wanted a one-to-one fight. But reinforcements from outside the school were called in by mobile phone.

Ridgeway School disputes the allegations against it and says blaming it for the attack, carried out by a non-pupil outside school hours, is 'unprecedented and far-fetched'.

The case is being brought by Mr Webster, now 18, his mother Elizabeth Walker, 46, who has her own nanny recruitment business, his younger brother Joseph, 14, and his step-father Roger Durnford, 44, who runs a building company. They are also seeking damages, saying they were traumatised by witnessing his injuries and his suffering.

SOURCE



Mother-of-two dies after NHS surgeon punctures heart during back operation

Another poorly trained Indian doctor by the sound of it

A 51-year-old finance assistant, Christie Burgess, bled to death after a surgeon punctured her heart three times during a routine back operation. Miss Burgess had been sent to Salford Royal Hospital for emergency surgery on a prolapsed disc but during the operation, Tarek Jallul, a temporary surgeon, pierced her heart.

The blunder wasn't spotted until Mrs Burgess, from Macclesfield, Cheshire, became seriously ill. Although a specialist heart surgeon from the Manchester Royal Infirmary tried to correct the damage she died a few hours later.

Her partner, Kevin Jones, 58, has been awarded an undisclosed settlement from the NHS trust after a three-year legal battle. [There had to be a battle??? Insult added to injury!]

But Mr Jones says the hospital have never apologised for the mother-of-three's death or fully explained what went wrong. He said: "I'm really, really angry. It would help me dramatically if I could get to the bottom of it and get some answers. "It would give me some kind of closure on Christine's death." Janet Lamb, her sister said: "She was the best sister anyone could ask for." ""She should be here to enjoy her grandchildren."

The hospital said it "deeply regretted" Mrs Burgess's death and there is now a specialist heart surgeon constantly on call.

Mrs Burgess, a financial assistant for a chemical company Ciba, had suffered back problems but was the told the operation in May 2006 was a simple procedure. It's understood locum consultant Mr Jallul, who was employed by the hospital on a temporary contract, now works overseas. The General Medical Council launched an investigation he was given a formal warning.

In a statement, the hospital said: "We deeply regret the death of Mrs Burgess. "Legal proceedings commenced earlier this year and both parties have agreed an-out of-court resolution."

SOURCE



British Diplomas in science 'cannot work'

Labour’s new diploma in science should be scrapped because it lacks academic rigour, according to leading scientists

In an embarrassing blow to the Government, highly-respected bodies including the Royal Society and the Institute of Physics said the flagship qualification “cannot work for the sciences”. They said the diploma – which combines classroom study with practical, work-based learning – was confused and failed to “satisfy this diverse range of requirements”.

Ministers have suggested that diplomas could eventually replace GCSEs and A-levels altogether, bridging the divide between academic and vocational qualifications. But in a letter to Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, scientists said it was disingenuous to suggest that courses could appeal to practically-minded pupils while preparing others for traditional degrees such as physics, chemistry, mathematics and medicine. It should be replaced by a more overtly vocational diploma in “applied sciences”, they said.

The comments strike at the heart of concerns over Labour’s diplomas which are being introduced in three academic subjects – science, languages and humanities. The Conservatives have already pledged to scrap the academic diplomas. Last year, the Confederation of British Industry said the new-style qualifications risked "undermining the integrity" of key subjects and could lead to fewer schoolchildren studying science and mathematics to a high standard.

In their letter to Mr Balls, it was claimed many scientists had “serious reservations” about the new diploma. “The science diploma under development apparently still aims to meet the needs of those students aspiring to the full range of science and mathematics courses at all universities while, at the same time, also addressing the needs of students preparing to enter the world of work at age 19,” it said. “We do not accept the view that a… science qualification with the structure of the current diplomas can satisfy this diverse range of requirements.”

Earlier this year the Government announced the science diploma would be delayed by 12 months because it needed “further work”. Pupils will now study it in 2012.

The letter – signed by leading figures at the Royal Society, the Society of Biology, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Physics, the Nuffield Foundation and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation – welcomed the move but insisted it was still dogged by the “confused thinking and bureaucracy that plagued the early development” of the qualification.

Diplomas are currently offered in 10 practical subjects, such as hospitality, hair and beauty, manufacturing and media studies. Four more vocational subjects will be introduced to the programme before academic diplomas are introduced in 2011 and 2012.

In the letter, sent last month, scientists said: “This is not to say that we reject diplomas outright, just that the current model cannot work for the sciences.” They added: “Our vision is for a science diploma which is explicitly an applied sciences qualification. To convey this appropriately to key stakeholders we believe the qualification should be renamed ‘diploma in applied sciences’. “Crucially, our vision is not one which includes an attempt to meet the needs of the majority of young people who aspire to study the sciences at university. It therefore differs significantly from what is currently being developed.”

Iain Wright, the Schools Minister, said: “The Royal Society letter represents the views of just some but not all of the science community. "Indeed there is strong support from both academics and industry who do see the potential value of this new and exciting offer for young people. These include universities, employers and practitioners, as well as influential members of the science community such as science academics from Oxford University, Imperial College, AstraZeneca and the NHS. It was and is being produced hand in glove with industry and higher education. “The diplomas have yet to be finalised and we continue to listen to all views. The Science Diploma Development Partnership is currently holding a series of focus groups with universities, employers and practitioners to hear directly from them what they want from the diploma. No final decisions will be taken until we have had an opportunity to hear all views including those expressed in the letter from members of the Royal Society.”

SOURCE



Some competition in Britain at last?: "Airport operator BAA has agreed to sell Gatwick, Britain's second busiest airport, for 1.5 billion pounds (2.5 billion US dollars, 1.6 billion euros), the Financial Times reported. Citing people familiar with the matter, the FT reported on its website that the deal with Global Infrastructure Partners, which already own London City Airport, will likely be announced before markets open on Wednesday. The Competition Commission approved details of the sale late Tuesday, it said. In August last year, British regulators called for BAA to sell three of its seven airports in Britain -- two in London and one in Scotland -- in order to end a dominance they said hurts both passengers and airlines."

Church of England to lose some of its real Christians to Rome: "The Roman Catholic Church today moved to poach thousands of traditional Anglicans who are dismayed by growing acceptance of gays and women priests and bishops. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams admitted that he had been caught out after Pope Benedict XVI announced a new “Apostolic Constitution” to provide a legal framework for the many thousands of Anglicans and former Anglicans who wish “to enter into full visible communion with the Roman Catholic Church”. The announcement paves the way for thousands of Anglicans worldwide to join the Roman Catholic church while maintaining elements of their own spiritual heritage. The constitution, a canonical structure, will provide “personal ordinariates” that will allow Anglicans to “set up church” within the Catholic church while retaining elements of their former ecclesiastical identity, such as Anglican liturgies and vestments. Traditionalists, including up to six Church of England bishops, had visited and pleaded with Rome to provide some sort of structure inside the Catholic Church for their wing of the Church of England because of liberal moves towards women bishops and gay ordinations."





21 October, 2009

Why did Indian doctor miss my daughter's fatal cancer EIGHT times?

The NHS imports a lot of poorly trained doctors from overseas



A young woman died of cervical cancer after her GP failed to spot symptoms during eight visits over four years. Nikki Sams repeatedly complained of stomach pains and bleeding but Dr Navin Shankar never carried out an internal examination, telling told her it was 'nothing serious'. It was only when she was referred to another practice - when Shankar, 59, was suspended for serious misconduct in a case involving a baby - that she was immediately given a smear test. Miss Sams had a hysterectomy the following week and began radiotherapy and chemotherapy but died around a year later aged 26.

The General Medical Council last week upheld a number of complaints against Shankar following the start of a fitness to practise hearing. It has been adjourned while his performance is assessed.

Miss Sams' father Michael, 54, who quit his job as an airport worker to care for his daughter, yesterday accused Shankar of a 'catalogue of unforgivable errors'. He added: 'Nikki was so brave, she never complained or said "Why me?" but she died unnecessarily. 'It is unbelievable that in this day and age a girl can go to her doctor so many times with all these symptoms and be told not to worry. 'The hysterectomy was such a blow for Nikki because she desperately wanted a family, but that was just the start of the nightmare. 'I have a younger daughter and Nikki was her role model. This has torn our family apart.'

Miss Sams' case will raise fresh questions about the age at which women are given smear tests on the NHS. It is only available to over-25s in England, but to over-20s in the rest of the UK.

Miss Sams, a saleswoman from Luton, Bedfordshire, first saw Shankar in 1999 at the Wigmore Lane Health Centre in the town. She was only seen by another GP in 2005 when Shankar, who qualified in India in 1971, was suspended by the GMC for serious professional misconduct after he blamed a nine-day-old boy's life-threatening blood clot on a tight nappy. The GP was later found to have altered his notes. He had told the parents that the baby was fine, despite the fact that his toes were becoming gangrenous.

After Miss Sams' new doctor immediately recommended a smear test, further examinations found a tumour on her cervix. She had treatment at the Mount Vernon Hospital Cancer Centre in Northwood, Middlesex, and was told the cancer was gone. But X-rays taken following a minor car accident in early 2007 revealed it had spread. She died at home six months later, in August 2007.

The GMC hearing on Shankar will be reconvened at a date yet to be set. If his fitness to practise is deemed to be 'impaired' he could receive a warning, have conditions placed on his registration, be suspended or struck off.

SOURCE



Fathers at birth 'causes longer labour, mental illness'

I am inclined to think the ob/gyn below has a point. It's risky to rely on clinical experience as evidence but it would be a mistake to disregard it willy nilly. I am inclined to think that it should be up to the woman: The father should be present only if the woman definitely wants that

For those fathers who make it through without fainting, the miracle of childbirth is an unforgettable experience. But their presence could actually be harming the mother and child, a leading obstetrician warned yesterday. Michael Odent claims having a husband or partner in the room at the birth increases the likelihood of a Caesarean section, subsequent marriage break-up and even mental illness. He also believes it makes the labour longer and more painful because the woman is distracted by the father's anxiety.

Delivering children would be much simpler if women were left alone in the care of their midwife, he claims.

'The ideal birth environment involves no men in general,' he said yesterday. 'Having been involved for more than 50 years in childbirths in homes and hospitals in France, England and Africa, the best environment I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody around the woman in labour apart from a silent, low-profile and experienced midwife.

'In this situation, more often than not, the birth is easier and faster than what happens when there are other people around, especially male figures – husbands and doctors.'

More than 90 per cent of births in the UK have a male partner in attendance, studies show.

But Dr Odent claimed that having males present at the birth makes the mother tense, leading her to produce adrenaline. This slows her production of the hormone oxytocin, which is vital for childbirth, thus extending the length of the labour. 'If she can't release oxytocin she can't have effective contractions, and everything becomes more difficult,' said the French doctor, who runs the Primal Health Research childbirth charity in London. 'Labour becomes longer, more painful and more difficult because the hormonal balance in the woman is disturbed by the environment that's not appropriate because of the presence of the man.'

Sexual attraction between a couple can also disappear after the birth and lead to divorce, he says. Some men even end up suffering from a widely unrecognised male equivalent of postnatal depression. The 'masculinisation of the birth environment' has, Dr Odent argues, contributed to the number of women now having Caesarean sections.

He is due to outline his controversial views at the annual conference of the Royal College of Midwives in Manchester next month. But critics say there is little evidence to support his claims. Duncan Fisher, of the fatherhood advice website Dad Info, said: 'I think he's wrong and is not basing his argument on evidence either that it damages men or their relationships with mothers. 'Of course, not all men are nervous and a lot of women would be even more nervous without their partner there. Mothers want them there because it is not home.'

Mary Newburn, of the National Childbirth Trust, said there were now cultural pressures on men to attend the birth of their child. She added: 'There's such a feeling among women that "you got me into this, I have carried the baby for nine months and now I have to go through labour and birth, so the least you can do is be with me, and if you feel a bit squeamish, then tough". 'I wouldn't go as far Dr Odent in saying that men are always unhelpful in labour. But it's not men's right to be there. 'The most important thing is that the woman feels safe, secure and supported, so if she wants to have a woman around instead, that's fine.'

SOURCE



Screening test ‘doubles the chance of pregnancy for women on IVF’

A genetic-screening test could more than double the chances of pregnancy for women who undergo fertility treatment, a study suggests. The first trial of its kind has found that two out of three women having in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) became pregnant if their embryos were checked for abnormalities before being implanted in the womb, compared with less than a third where the test was not used.

The technique, known as comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH), checks chromosomes in the developing embryo. Only those embryos with the best chance of becoming a healthy baby are used in fertility treatment. The £2,000 test is available in only a handful of private clinics in Britain. Researchers hope that it will become standard practice to help both NHS and paying patients to start a family.

Dagan Wells, a Senior Fellow in Reproductive Genetics at Oxford University who developed CGH, said that babies had now been born among a group of 115 American women whose embryos had been screened. The results will be presented this week at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s annual conference in Atlanta.

The women received IVF treatment at the Colorado Centre for Reproductive Medicine in the US, but cells from the embryos were flown to Dr Wells’s clinic in Oxford for analysis. The results showed that 66 per cent of women fell pregnant if CGH was used to select the best embryos for implantation — more than double the proportion (28 per cent) of women who fell pregnant at the clinic when the test was not used.

Dr Wells described the improvement in pregnancy rates as “astonishing”, and particularly impressive as many of the women were on their “last chance” at conceiving with fertility treatment — they were typically aged 39 with two failed IVF cycles behind them. “We were taken aback by the impact it had on the success rates,” Dr Wells said. “I think it’s at the point now that we can say with great confidence that we are seeing a positive effect of this.”

Up to one in six couples have difficulty conceiving a baby naturally and some 37,000 patients are treated at IVF clinics in Britain each year. During treatment, a woman’s eggs are collected, fertilised in a laboratory with her partner’s or a donor’s sperm and then implanted back into the womb. But many women suffer miscarriages or do not become pregnant at all if the resulting embryos carry an abnormal number of chromosomes. However, until now it has proved difficult to examine all the chromosomes in an embryo, meaning that screening techniques have produced limited success in weeding out those with little chance of leading to a successful pregnancy.

CGH solves the problem by allowing doctors to look at every chromosome in the developing embryo. It could be particularly useful for older women, who are more likely to produce eggs with the abnormalities. It could also be used to maximise the chances of success for younger women and couples paying up to £3,000 for each cycle of IVF treatment, and to check for genetic conditions such as Down’s syndrome.

More than 20 babies have so far been born in the United States as a result of CGH screening, Dr Wells added. Screened embryos so far have a live birth success rate of 80 per cent per cycle of IVF, compared with 60 per cent for women who did not have the test.

Last month fertility specialists in Nottingham used a similar technique — known as “array CGH” — to examine eggs rather than embryos. A couple who had failed with 13 IVF attempts produced a baby.

SOURCE







Must not say that homosexuality is a risky lifestyle

We read:

"Britain's press watchdog says it has received a record 21,000 complaints about a newspaper column on the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately after critics used Twitter to brand the article homophobic and insensitive.

Gately died on October 10, aged 33, while vacationing on the Spanish island of Majorca. An autopsy found he had died of natural causes from pulmonary oedema, or fluid in the lungs.

Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote in a column on Friday that Gately's death was "not, by any yardstick, a natural one" and said he died in "sleazy" circumstances, She noted that Gately, who came out publicly as gay in 1999, he had been to a bar and invited a young Bulgarian man back to his apartment the night before he died.

Moir concluded that "under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see".

Anger at the column swept social networking site Twitter soon after Moir's piece appeared on the paper's website. Actor Stephen Fry urged his 860,000 Twitter followers to contact the Press Complaints Commission. Other prominent Tweeters followed suit, and provided links to the commission's website.

Moir defended her article, claiming suggestions of homophobia were "mischievous" and suggesting the backlash was a "heavily orchestrated internet campaign".

Source

The original article is here. "The Daily Mail" is conservative-leaning.



How new British laws will do huge harm to women

By Amanda Platell

When Gordon Brown paid tribute to his ‘brilliant deputy leader’ Harriet Harman, he said ‘her Equality Bill will change Britain for ever’. Sadly, he may be right. Because in the real world her law will do nothing but damage the cause of women’s rights.

It took one of Britain’s top businesswomen to speak the truth. Nichola Pease, deputy chairman of JO Hambro capital management and a mother of three, told a parliamentary hearing this week that Harman’s equal rights laws and the sex discrimination compensation culture it has spawned — with its ludicrous financial awards — are damaging women’s career chances.

But then what would Harriet Harman know about the dynamics of the workplace? The real workplace I mean, rather than the claustrophobic bubble of politics where she has spouted her obsessive feminism for the past 27 years.

Ms Pease pointed out that the 12- month maternity leave proposed by Harman is doing untold damage to businesses, and thus women’s chances of employment.

She also shattered the myth of the ‘glass ceiling’. Many women do not reach the top table not because of discrimination, she said, but because they chose to go only so far in their careers before consciously putting their family before their work. And thank heavens they do. Our country’s future depends on stable families.

The simple fact is, Ms Harman’s attempt to redesign the entire business world to suit her agenda has actually provoked far more prejudice than ever existed before.

I know several bosses, male and female, who will not employ senior women now because of Ms Harman’s legislation. They simply cannot afford the risk of a sex discrimination case or the possibility of a new recruit taking a considerable period of time off on paid maternity leave, especially as companies struggle to cut costs in the recession. The danger is that Harman’s laws will make more and more employers have the same doubts about all women, regardless of their personal circumstances.

As a society we should be applauding women who do the crucial work of balancing work and family to raise healthy children in stable homes. And we should reward those who put the hours and the years into their careers, whatever their gender, because business and the creation of wealth and jobs are as important to our future as our children.

Feminist? Ms Harman is a zealot whom history will judge to have done more to hinder the progress of women in the 21st century than any Page 3 bimbo.

SOURCE



Influx of 1m migrants to Britain will cripple public spending, warn MPs

New immigrants will add almost 1m people to Britain’s population over the next five years, creating huge pressure on public spending, a group of leading MPs has warned. Frank Field, a former Labour minister and the group’s leader, said the figures would give succour to the far right British National party (BNP) which was exploiting the failure of the mainstream parties to allay public fears about immigration. The BNP will receive a boost this week when it is given its first platform on BBC1’s Question Time.

The MPs’ warning comes as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is expected to confirm that immigration will account for 900,000 of the anticipated 1.9m growth in the population over the lifetime of the next parliament.

Field, co-chairman of the cross-party group for balanced migration and a former welfare minister under Tony Blair, said that both Labour and the Tories had failed to address the population crunch. He believes the crisis in public finances caused by the recession means the government can no longer afford to pay for the extra schools, hospitals and other facilities needed. “It is obvious there will be no money to provide the extra facilities required by another 1m people,” he said. “The case for a really effective limit on immigration is overwhelming. Both parties must now decide on a limit and then tell the voters what it will be, how it will work and what it will cover.”

The ONS is expected to show that the population will grow by 10m to more than 70m in about 20 years. About 7m of the increase will be due to immigration. The MPs’ group argues that the only effective way to control immigration is to balance the numbers coming in with those going out.

Research published by Field’s group last month showed that by 2013 an extra 96,000 primary school places will be needed in England and Wales — the equivalent of nearly 500 primary schools. Two-thirds of those places would be for children with at least one parent not born in the UK. The extra burden on the taxpayer of building these schools would be £1 billion over five years, or £200m a year. Yet with a public debt of more than £800 billion, ministers are having to cut spending rather than increase it.

David Cameron has said that if elected a Tory government would introduce a cap on migrants, but he has yet to disclose a number or which types of worker would be affected.

Phil Woolas, the border and immigration minister, said: “Net migration has dramatically fallen. This is further proof that migrants come to the UK for short periods of time, work, contribute to the economy and then return home. “We have made it clear that we do not favour a cap on immigration because it is a crude measure which could harm the economy and is not as effective as our robust and flexible points-based system.”

Immigration is falling due to Eastern Europeans returning home because of the recession.

Field’s latest estimate assumes that net migration — the difference between those coming in to stay and those leaving permanently — will fall from 237,000 a year to 150,000 and stay there. Children born to immigrants will take the figure to 900,000 over five years. His group says net immigration would have to be cut to less than 50,000 if the population was not to increase to 70m.

SOURCE



Batty Britain: Immigrant allowed to stay because of pet cat

An immigrant who was about to be deported from Britain has won a legal battle to remain in the country – partly because he and his girlfriend had bought a pet cat. The Asylum and Immigration Tribunal ruled that sending the Bolivian man back to his homeland would breach his human rights because he was entitled to a "private and family life", and joint ownership of a pet was evidence that he was fully settled in this country. [That was easy! A rush on pet shops coming up!]

Lawyers for the Home Secretary were aghast at the decision by James Devittie, an immigration judge, to allow the immigrant to stay in Britain. They lodged an appeal, but their case was again rejected. The Bolivian's identity has not been disclosed and even the name of the pet cat was blanked out in official court papers to protect its privacy. Delivering her decision on the case, which is thought to have cost the taxpayer several thousand pounds, Judith Gleeson, a senior immigration judge, joked in the official written ruling that the cat "need no longer fear having to adapt to Bolivian mice".

Barry O'Leary, solicitor for the Bolivian, said that the court was told that man and his girlfriend had purchased the animal together, and it was therefore "one detail among many" that they were in a committed relationship. "As part of the application and as part of the appeal, the couple gave detailed statements of the life they had built together in the UK to show the genuine nature and duration of their relationship," he said. "One detail provided, among many, was that they had owned a cat together for some time.

"The appeal was successful and when giving the reasons for the success the judge did comment on the couple's cat. It was taken into account as part of the couple's life together. "The Home Office asked for the decision to be reconsidered. They argued it should be reconsidered because the decision was wrong in law, and one error they cited was that too much consideration was given to the couple's cat."

Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, said: "Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry. If pet ownership is going to be used as a reason for deciding immigration cases then the law really is an ass. "This is clearly not a sensible use of human rights legislation which is designed to protect people's basic needs."

The case comes a week after The Sunday Telegraph disclosed how the same court had given permission for more than 50 foreign criminals, including killers and sex offenders, to avoid deportation because of human rights concerns. A court's consideration of the right to family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights often focuses on whether an immigrant should stay in Britain because they have children who were born in this country. However, this is believed to be the first time the courts have been asked to attach weight to joint custody of a pet.

A UK Border Agency spokesman said: "We were disappointed by the court's decision in this case. "The UK Border Agency vigorously opposes any appeal against detention, deportation or removal but if the courts insist an individual cannot be removed we have to accept their judgement."

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of MigrationwatchUK, which campaigns against mass immigration, said: "Drawing pets into the consideration of issues of such importance is so utterly absurd that you could not make it up. "I despair. This is symptomatic of the attitude held by many of the judiciary, which is complete disregard for the impact of such decisions on the future of our community."

Mr O'Leary added that his client originally brought the case because he should have benefited from a Home Office policy on unmarried partners which gives credit to couples who have been together more than two years. The Bolivian had been with his partner for four years, he said. "It was made clear by the initial judge and then by Senior Immigration Judge Gleeson that the appellant should benefit from that policy and be granted the right to remain," he said.

"Furthermore, it was accepted by the Home Office representative at the hearing before Judge Gleeson that the policy should apply and any other errors in the initial decision by the judge, including too much detail on the cat, were immaterial." He added: "This case was won because the Home Office had a policy which they did not initially apply but later, through their representative, they accepted should have been applied."

A spokesman from the Judicial Communications Office said: "This was a case in which the Home Office conceded that they had mistakenly failed to apply their own policy for dealing with unmarried partners of people settled in the UK."

SOURCE



E.ON condemns overambitious British government targets for green energy

Government plans to generate 30 per cent of UK electricity from renewable sources by 2020 are doomed to failure, according to the chief executive of one of the world’s biggest utility companies.

Wulf Bernotat, chief executive of E.ON, said that British politicians needed to stop misleading the public about what was achievable. He said that British plans to build 33 gigawatts of offshore wind power, up from 0.6 gigawatts at present, was impossible, given the necessary investment and relatively short timeframe. “Politicians need to be more realistic,” he said. “If you just set out these targets without really taking the effort to square it with industry, then you end up with the dilemma of it not being achievable.”

E.ON, which reported 2008 revenues of €87 billion (£79 billion), more than any of its peers, plans to spend €10 billion a year globally on new power-generating equipment, including nuclear power plants, wind farms, gas and coal plants. It has invested about £930 million in Britain this year and is a key partner in London Array, a £3 billion project to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm in the Thames Estuary.

Mr Bernotat said that there was a bigger mismatch between government targets and what was achievable in Britain than in E.ON’s other key European markets, including its home market. “Germany started earlier and there is a bigger base to build on,” he said. “It’s not a question of willingness. Targets have to be ambitious but the expectation level should be realistic.” E.ON, which employs 88,000 people, has eight million customers in Britain through its UK subsidiary. Its ten coal, gas and oil-fired power stations generate about 10 per cent of the UK’s electricity.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “We must clean up our energy supplies to meet our climate change goals and that will mean a massive expansion of renewable energy. Our target is ambitious but we have a strategy to meet it by 2020.”

SOURCE



Gap in educational success between rich and poor areas of Britain widening, says report

Despite 12 years of government by a party loudly committed to narrowing the gap. More evidence that Leftist parties don't know what they are doing. If your theories are wrong, you won't get the results you expect

The gap in educational success between rich and poor areas of Britain is widening, despite investment of millions of pounds each year, according to research published today. A day before Lord Mandelson, the Universities Secretary, outlines the Government’s strategy for increasing social mobility through wider access to further and higher education, a report by the University and College Union (UCU) shows that the gulf between rich and poor areas in the numbers completing a degree has widened over four years.

In some parliamentary constituencies, almost two thirds of the working-age population are graduates while in others fewer than one person in ten has a degree or equivalent qualification. Across Britain 29 per cent now have a degree but more than 12 per cent have no qualifications, according to the report.

Tomorrow Lord Mandelson will give the Confederation of British Industry a preview of his plans to boost social mobility through a new framework for higher education.

A Government taskforce chaired by Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary, identified the continuing low participation in higher education by those from poor families as one of the main obstacles to social mobility. There have been marginal increases in the number of students from the lowest socio-economic groups over the past two years but the UCU report shows that many areas have not shared in the trend. In Sheffield, for example, 60 per cent of people living in the Hallam constituency represented by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, are graduates - four times the figure for the nearby Brightside constituency represented by David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary.

In the 20 constituencies with the largest numbers going to university, the proportion of the working-age population with a degree-level qualification increased from 48.8 per cent in 2005 to 57.2 per cent in 2008. But the 20 constituencies with the lowest level of participation in higher education saw a decline from 12.6 per cent to 12.1 per cent. The Richmond Park constituency, in southwest London, has the largest proportion of graduates, at more than 63 per cent of the working-age population. In Doncaster North and Birmingham Hodge Hill fewer than 10 per cent have degrees.

The report also shows considerable regional variations. Eight of the 20 constituencies with the lowest proportion of qualifications are in the West Midlands. London attracts the highest number of graduates, with 17 of the 25 constituencies that boast the most graduates found in the capital.

Sally Hunt, the UCU general secretary, said: "The current Government has rightly prioritised investment in education but this report shows that the problem is even more deep-seated than previously thought and is a challenge for all the parties. Education holds the key to improving social mobility, tackling poverty and extending opportunity for all." Ms Hunt said the report showed the current divide between the “haves and have nots” was growing. Where a person lived largely determined their chances of educational success. [Rubbish! Place of residence is incidental. Richer people are smarter overall and have smarter kids]

SOURCE





20 October, 2009

BRITAIN: THE CRIME-FRIENDLY STATE

This blog has listed endless episodes of perverse "justice" in Britain. Two more reports of decayed British justice are listed below followed by a detailed examination of how political correctness has destroyed policing. In just 12 years, the Labour Party government has destroyed a justice system that was once a byword for excellence

Jail sentences are not remotely what they seem in Britain

Six-month jail terms are being slashed to six weeks and 28-day sentences are being waived by prison governors desperate to ease record levels of overcrowding, The Times has learnt. Judges and magistrates are infuriated that sentences passed in courts are being unilaterally cut by governors using early release schemes and prison regulations. The growing concern on the bench is that the actions of prison governors will undermine public faith in the criminal justice system.

The Times was present at Inner London Crown Court last week when a judge jailed a woman for six months but said she was likely to be free in six weeks. Sentencing the Nigerian for false passport offences, Judge Lindsay Burn said: “The practical effect under sentencing policy, as applied by prison governors, is that she could expect to be released after serving six weeks.”

There is evidence of governors freeing short-term prisoners before they have served any time at all. Essex magistrates say they were told by a governor at their AGM last month that he turned away offenders sentenced to 28 days. One magistrate quoted the governor as saying: “Serco will telephone me and say they have a short-term prisoner in the van ... and I will just tell them not to even bring them to prison, let them go.”

Another magistrate claimed that quirks in the penal system can lead to an offender sentenced on a Friday to 42 days being freed immediately. Writing on a legal blog, the magistrate warned: “Don’t give anyone 42 days on a Friday.” The writer said the sentence was automatically cut in half to 21 days, then 18 days were subtracted for early release, leaving a sentence of three days. Because prisons do not release inmates at weekends the offender was set free immediately with a resettlement grant.

Prison governors, who have called for the abolition of all sentences of less than one year, are struggling to manage a prison population that hit a record high of 84,711 on Friday. They have discretion to release people early on licence or with electronic tags if they have served a minimum of seven days, but governors can also draw on prison regulations about temporary release. These rules allow inmates to be released to undertake courses, engage in work or “assist in maintaining family ties or transition from prison life to freedom”.

Legal sources said they believe that these regulations were being exploited to release short-term prisoners without them serving any time. Representatives of the judiciary and the magistracy have raised the situation with ministers amid fears that early releases are undermining public confidence in the courts and criminal justice. “There is concern among judges that at the time of sentence the judge is in no position to know exactly how long the individual is likely to serve in custody,” Judge David Swift, chairman of the Council of her Majesty’s Circuit Judges’ criminal committee, said. “The judiciary has been expressing this concern for some considerable time.”

John Thornhill, chairman of the Magistrates’ Association, said that his members were very frustrated at the attitude and behaviour of prison governors. “There is a debate to be had about the value of short sentences,” he said. “But whilst short-term custodial sentences are still part of statute they are a proper sentence and it is the responsibility of governors to apply the sentence imposed by the court.”

Mr Thornhill added that contradictions in sentencing practices were rife and that magistrates had asked Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to address the problem. He added: “The system is quite fractured at the moment, there are just so many anomalies.” The problem is worst in the South East, where court caseloads and prison populations are mounting.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said that sentencing was a matter for the courts, but added that ministers were committed to ending early release on licence “as soon as there is sufficient capacity in the prison estate to do so”.

Early release with electronic tags was, the ministry said, governed by strict eligibility criteria. The spokesman added: “Governors do not have discretion over a prisoner’s eligibility, but over whether they pass a risk assessment of whether they are suitable. Prisoners on both schemes are liable to be returned to prison if they breach their conditions.”

SOURCE



Crime adviser says British justice system is seen as ‘too sympathetic’ to criminals

Many people working in the criminal justice system instinctively side with offenders because they want to give them a second chance, says the Government’s neighbourhood crime adviser. This leaves the public thinking that the system is set up to meet the needs of criminals rather than the victims of crime and the wider public, she warns.

Louise Casey said that resistance to giving the public more information about what happens to criminals comes from people working in the system who do not want to stigmatise offenders.

Ms Casey told The Times: “I think if you spend a lot of time with offenders you start to hear that they have had tough lives and you start to understand why they have ended up offending in the first place. You are a human being and you start to feel for these people. That is human.”

However, Ms Casey added: “I think they miss something. The public want a criminal justice system that is not the criminal’s justice system. They really want a public justice system.”

Research she has conducted shows that two thirds of the public think the system respects the rights of the offender more than the rights of victims.

She said that, although the findings were unfair on the police and local councils, efforts had to be made to change public perception. After a decade-long struggle that ran into opposition in the Home Office and Probation Service, criminals made to do unpaid work in the community have been required to wear orange jackets since December 2008. Ms Casey, who recommended the introduction of the jackets, said that resistance to the idea came from people in the criminal justice system who did not understand that the public needed to see “visible consequences for those who break the law”.

She said that, unless they saw offenders on community sentences being punished, they would feel that lawbreakers get away with it. Ms Casey added: “I am pleased orange jackets are being used. A crude, blunt instrument, but it is there.”

Their introduction appears to have increased public awareness that criminals given community sentences do give something back by working on derelict land or painting youth clubs and old people’s homes. A Home Office survey found that public knowledge of work done by offenders has risen from 48 per cent in the month before the introduction of orange jackets to 74 per cent in April this year.

Her proposal to put the outcome of court cases on websites and leaflets as a way of telling the public when a person has been convicted of a crime in their neighbourhood has also met resistance. Some people argue that it is not a proportionate response to offending and could breach a criminal’s human rights.

Ms Casey is dismissive and would clearly relish the issue being challenged in court. “It is hard for them [people in the system] to see that it is not about being horrible to offenders.

“It is about being right about what is right and wrong. It is about what justice is about. If you don’t break the law, you won’t end up in a courtroom, you won’t end up on a leaflet being put through somebody’s door and you won’t be discussed. But if you break the rules there are some consequences because the public needs to know that people who break the rules face consequences, otherwise they give up hope.”

She said that those opposing the idea did not understand that, unless the public could see visible consequences for lawbreakers, they would not come forward with information because they would feel that there was no point in doing so.

Her attack on those working in the criminal justice system follows comments she made earlier this year in which she lambasted them for adopting a “we know best” and paternalistic attitude towards the public. In the speech she said the system was remote and impenetrable to the public.

The consequences, she said, are that people become afraid to leave their own homes for fear of being attacked. “I was in Greater Manchester once on an estate where the shopping parade was taken over at night by yobs. The public put up with an awful lot, and I sometimes think: ‘How in God’s name do you live in these areas?’

“The public need to know that action is going to be taken, and it is tough action.”

Ms Casey, who is a civil servant working in the Home Office on tackling antisocial behaviour and neighbourhood crime, made it clear she will serve under the Tories or Labour, saying it did not matter which party was in power as long as the Government delivered a better quality of life for people in their neighbourhoods.

SOURCE



Multiculturalism Has Destroyed the British Police

Britain has drastically lowered its police entry requirements, even to the point of overlooking criminal records, in order to recruit a higher proportion of ethnic minorities. The British police now recruit immigrants who are not even British citizens, provided they have indefinite leave to remain in the UK.

We do check whether a newly arrived immigrant from Somalia or the Sudan has a criminal record relating to rape, murder or genocide, but the reality is we have absolutely no idea as to the true identity of the man in question. With our home-grown ethnic minorities, it is important that certain criminal records are overlooked because despite making up only a purported 10% of Britain’s population, they punch well above their proportional weight when it comes to criminality, thus ensuring their admittance as 25-30% (pdf) of the prison population, whilst a full 77% of young black males have been arrested for suspected criminal offences and entered into the police database.

The irony of course is that the St Vincent Police Force, with all its stringent character requirements, recruits only nationals from St Vincent, who are, quite naturally, black. If Britain had not allowed the liberal/left to destroy its educational system, religion, morality, the family, and most importantly, the economically poor, fatherhood-poor black family, perhaps we could emulate the noble St Vincentonians, but alas we lost the war against the progressive policies of the liberal/left some years ago and must now recruit from a far less qualified ethnic minority base.

There was a time when the British police entry standards were as high as those of St Vincent. There was a minimum height requirement, 5 “O”-levels were needed, criminal records were not overlooked and physical fitness was a pre-requisite. But multiculturalism and socialism have turned the traditional and decent Britain of the recent past on its head.

A quick glance at the Metropolitan Police Authority recruitment targets for 2009-10 reveals the liberal insanity that has taken over this pitiful Island. 27% of all new police recruits must be “black and minority ethnic” (BME) and 41% must be female.

West Midlands Police Authority has seized upon such directives with glee. What would once have been called racial and sexual discrimination against white males is now called Positive Action, which is why the police are able to recruit black and ethnic minorities in far higher percentage terms than their population warrants.

White males will account for a mere 30% of new Metropolitan Police recruits over the next three years, but unfortunately for the powers that be, it is still white males who overwhelmingly apply to join. The result is that they are simply turned away, and the reason given, with no hint of hypocrisy or shame, is because they are white. In 2006, two thirds of white males were turned down for interview by Gloucester Police, whilst every single ethnic minority and female was accepted (for interview).

Looking at the police recruitment site today is profoundly depressing. The fact that no academic qualifications are needed becomes apparent when we are told that 60% of applicants fail at the first hurdle. Such large numbers suggest perhaps that the applicants were unable to translate Homer’s Iliad into modern Greek, but this, alas, is not quite the case. The 60% of aspiring plods weeded out at stage one are discarded because they lack the ability… to fill out the application form correctly!

This most extraordinary admission becomes even more appalling when one discovers the police recruitment department will sell you a DVD full of useful tips on becoming a police officer, including a section on How-To-Fill-Out-The-Application-Form-Correctly.

Should you manage to gouge out your name, address, and conviction date correctly, you may be asked to progress to the next level, where your physical fitness will be evaluated. Gone are the days of running a mile in seven minutes and doing 50 push-ups. Today you need only be “reasonably fit and able to run short distances fairly quickly.” I assume this requirement is more geared toward escape than pursuit.

The next stage is whether or not you can actually speak the language of the people you wish to police. The only requirement here is that you have mastered enough English to “Write short reports and potentially give evidence in court.”

The London Metropolitan Police do not beat around the bush in terms of identifying potential recruits. They are not looking for burly yeomen who can face up to crowds of baying, drunken youths on Saturday nights, but people who display the correct political attitudes. Providing one is aged between 18 and 57 — yes, you read 57 correctly — then the Met Police’s number one priority in personal qualities is Respect For Diversity.

This perverse pandering to ethnic minorities does not just stop there; it continues out into the streets where ethnic criminals are given the old softly-softly approach. Stop and Search is one of those thorny ethnic issues which so excite the liberal/left, who think it racist to disproportionately stop young black males in order to frisk them for knives. Black parents on the other hand are all in favour of it, not wishing their sons to be stabbed to death in the epidemic of knife crime UK that is overwhelmingly black on black.

The police have an intriguing way to get around this. They simply stop white youths, in the full knowledge they are innocent, to thus provide a racial balance. They also take instruction from young “streetwise” ethnic gang members, who despite a history of carrying weapons and assaulting police officers, tell the self-same police what street slang and behaviour they should adopt in order to be as inoffensive as possible whilst searching them for weapons they use to kill one another with. The police do this in order to “Command Respect.”

But blacks do not sit at the top of the grievance tree in Britain. For such an elevated position at the peak of the racial/religious ziggurat we must turn to Islam. It is proposed that British police officers should learn about Sharia law and the Koran, in order to better police the Islamic community.

The reason for this is because it is incumbent upon the police to further the relationship with those who wish to blow us up and take us over. Particularly with regard to “moderate Muslims” who have such a hard time living in democratic Britain they are apparently forced to think of the police as their enemy. In the words of Shipley Conservative MP, Philip Davies: “Research last year revealed that the police service would be very low on the list of agencies that the Muslim community would turn to if they had concerns about a member of their community who embraced violent extremism. The police service has a long way to go in building a relationship of trust around these issues.”

Really? If the Muslim community suspected one of their neighbours intended to massacre hundreds of innocent people on the tube, then the police would be just about the last people they would tell? And it is up to the police to build a relationship of trust with these moderate people?

Well yes, as it happens. West Yorkshire Chief Constable Norman Bettison couched it thus: “We work closely with communities and the majority of police training at the moment in this area is done in partnership with Muslim organisations.”

Muslim police

Can it get any worse? Of course it can! How about dressing up English policewomen in full-on Muslim garb to better understand the utter hell that is the life of Muslim women living in intolerant Britain? Called operation In Your Shoes Day, white policewomen wandered around Sheffield looking like mini Darth Vaders sans light sabres, at the behest of South Yorkshire Police, where they were variously stared at by security guards hoping to Allah they were not shoplifters in need of a good old frisking, not to mention nervous bus drivers.

A police spokesman (how terribly sexist is that in Britain’s modern, go ahead police service) defended this exercise in liberal lunacy as: “Just one of many activities South Yorkshire Police have planned with communities and ethnic minority leaders, to secure strong relationships, celebrate diversity and encourage integration (whose, I wonder?) working towards a safer, closer society.”

I am not too sure about the safer bit though. Muslim women are desperately sought after as Police Community Support Officers, but Muslim women hardly have an international reputation as surfer/swimmer babes, what with their apparel being more conducive to sinking than floating. Members of a police force who could not swim would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but not so today, where it is easier to drop the swimming requirement from police training rather than appear discriminatory toward swathed sinkers.

As always though, there are consequences to such liberal perversities — witness the death by drowning of ten-year-old Jordan Lyon in 2007, whilst a police community support officer observed from the banks of the pond as he/she consulted his/her health and safety pamphlet whilst a colleague ran to summon help.

They were defended by their superiors who claimed: “It would have been inappropriate for PCSOs, who are not trained in water rescue, to enter the pond.“ Tell that to the mother of Jordan Lyon, a mere boy who had entered the pond to save his sister and sacrificed his own life in the attempt, whilst two adults could not be held to the same standard. In the subsequent inquest they were not even required to attend the court. One wonders why, especially as their names and photographs have never been made public. Or perhaps one doesn’t wonder at all.

Another consequence unforeseen only by the liberal/left is not just the sheer uselessness of people recruited from the bottom of the barrel, but also their slightly less than honest attitudes. In 2006, the Guardian reported on an internal London Metropolitan Police report which found complaints of corruption aimed at “Asian” officers to be ten times higher than complaints against their white colleagues.

Amongst the PCSOs, who were introduced to tackle anti-social crime whilst bolstering the recruitment rates of Blacks, Muslims, women and the transgendered, gross misconduct cases account for 50% all cases within the forces, despite their making up only one fifth of the recruits. They are employed ONLY to make up ethnic and minority numbers. In terms of crime fighting they solve only one crime every four years and issue fines for anti-social behaviour at the rate of 1.5 per year.

And while the British police self-destruct in order to prove their non-racist credentials, their entire institution is awash with cries of “racism” and “prejudice.” Take the case of Assistant Chief Constable Anil Patani for example. When he was overlooked for promotion back in his sergeant days, he sued for racial discrimination. When he was promoted later in his career, he sued again, this time because he had been over-promoted because of his race, and was thus viewed with some bitterness by his colleagues who of course no longer liked him, indeed hated him. Anil Patani’s finest moment came when he tried to prosecute Channel Four for inciting racial hatred by daring to produce and broadcast the “Undercover Mosques” programme.

Commander Ali Dizaei was once destined for the very top. Today he is suspended under an impending charge of Perverting the Course of Justice. Dizaei’s whole career has been built around race. He was President of the National Black Police Association and race advisor to the Home Secretary (does not race advisor to Adolf Hitler sound more appropriate?) before his life became embroiled around corruption charges.

In 2008 Britain’s most senior Muslim officer, Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, sued his boss and Britain’s most senior police officer, Commissioner Ian Blair, over racism charges. Ghaffur was paid out and Sir Ian Blair resigned shortly afterwards. In the fallout that followed, the National Black Police Association took out full page adverts in newspapers, asking that ethnic minorities cease applying to join the police.

What total, utter, multicultural madness. But the biggest tragedy is what now happens on Britain’s streets as our police services sue and counter sue; attend race and diversity workshops, gender swap awareness courses and fill out 50 page racial incident documents in triplicate as to why they stopped and searched known black murderer Delroy Shanker in the early hours of May 15th.

The result of such insanity is that the police now manage a mere 6 hours a week actually out on the beat. They have effectively withdrawn from the streets, which have been taken over by lawless feral youths. They make fleeting appearances in order to arrest members of the general public who have the temerity to retaliate against their persecutors, but by and large the streets are now ruled by the underclass. Britain is not a country to be weak in.

The tragic case of Fiona Pilkington is the saddest story I have read in many years. A slightly backward mother, with variously backward children, poor Mrs Pilkington lacked the financial resources to live where liberal progressives live, and so was forced to share her life with the welfare-benefit classes whose morality has been destroyed by years of liberal progressive destruction. Stones and bricks were thrown through her windows and fireworks pushed through her letter box. Her young son was locked in a garden shed and threatened at knife-point, her daughter subjected to verbal and physical abuse.

Poor, tormented, mentally tortured Fiona Pilkington called the Leicestershire Police 33 times over a ten year period, but they never helped her. Not once. Eventually she bundled her daughter and herself into the vandalised family car, set fire to it, and departed to a place where one can only hope her tacit murderers will never gain admission via its pearly gates.

The police blamed the council, the council blamed the police. The chief of police did not resign. Imagine though, if the Pilkingtons had been black? I know this is a tired old cliché, but it is important to point out that since the Macpherson report the most important thing on the minds of coppers from Constables to Commissioners is to never, ever fail to give your undivided attention to a perceived racial incident. It is a career and pension killer, unlike the failure to take seriously the decade long persecution of a weak and vulnerable white woman and her children.

Leicestershire Constabulary (motto: Providing a second to none police service) takes its diversity guidelines very seriously. Commanded by temporary Chief Constable Chris Eyre who represented the East Midlands ACPO Asylum and Immigration Group, their National Disabled Police Association blurb informs us that one of their aims is to “Build trust and confidence between disabled people and the police service to improve community cohesion.” They also tell us they work to “Best Practice.” I don’t think so, Chief Constable Eyre.

The Guardian agonised as to why disability hate crimes were not taken as seriously as racial or gender based hate crimes, never pausing to think that Mrs Pilkington did not need to be a member of a politically designated oppressed minority to qualify for police help. Memo to Guardian readers, police officers heading up diversity divisions, and other such liberal/leftists who appear utterly devoid of the smallest scrap of human decency — Mrs Pilkington was a cruelly tortured and suffering Human Being in desperate need of help. Capiche?

Contrast this with another story published the same week. 71-year-old, disabled, German born pensioner Renate Bowling was arrested, thrown into the back of a police van and prosecuted for assault. Why? Because she had prodded a 17-year-old youth in the chest after he and his gang had thrown stones at her windows. When she caught him hiding behind a wall he called her a “f***ing German” which one would have thought constituted a racial offence, and certainly would if Germans were not quite so annoyingly white and Aryan. He was not arrested, of course.

Or what about the pensioner arrested for shouting at yobs who were stoning ducks on a canal, or the retired military police officer who has erected an electrified fence around his home after police ignored his 999 calls as paving slabs were hurled into his garden, or the woman advised by the police not to call them again as it would only escalate the problem despite the fact she had been punched to the floor of her own home by a gang of youths?

And on and on and on. It is unusual to get to the end of one day, let alone an entire week, without reading reports of women being assaulted, men being beaten to death by packs of liberally educated youths, and innocents of the wrong race, religion or class being arrested by the police on matters of utter inconsequence.

And these are only the stories that make the news. Every Brit today will tell you it is unsafe to go out in town centres after dark, and that the local police are worse than useless. Have you had much contact with Britain’s modern policemen? If you live in a town it is likely you never see them anymore, and even more likely that the local police station is not open in the evenings or weekends, or has been sold off and converted into a trendy urban live/work space. Over 500 police stations have been lost since 1992.

The reason for the decline of the British copper is very simple. Britain’s socialist government has converted — under the cover of multicultural compassion — what was once the Great British Police Force into one that is useless when it comes to protecting law abiding tax-payers, but highly efficient as the virtual paramilitary wing of a political movement which has ordained whites and middle-classes to be the enemies of the socialist state.

If you think that such a statement is paranoid, ask yourself why the police will not get involved in cases such as Fiona Pilkington’s, but speed to cases on full blues and twos when a religious, racial, gender, or class crime has been committed. Ask yourself why the police only seem to take the type of crime seriously that the socialist government promotes as serious, and why so many of the Chief Constables (all of whom owe their positions to a slavish devotion to the Labour Party) have degrees in criminology and sociology which promote criminals as victims of social injustice.

Take a look at this video of police “officers” retreating under a hail of sticks and traffic cones before a gang of Muslims shouting “This is war, Kuffar,” and then watch what happens when the white middle classes peacefully demonstrate in favour of fox hunting. Look at the bloodied faces and broken heads and consider why not one, not one policeman, was subsequently found guilty of police brutality.

The much-traduced British police are now protectors of the multicultural/socialist state rather than the protectors of the law-abiding general public. If you are a member of the ruling elite, the police are not only your political servants but also your personal bodyguards. If, on the other hand, you are a member of the increasingly persecuted class, by which I mean traditionally British, irrelevant of income or education, then the police have at best abandoned you, or at worst become your enemy.

SOURCE



British hospital trusts launch 'sinister' bid to reduce funding for more than 100 life-saving drugs

Health trusts are trying to reduce the number of life-saving drugs pioneered on the NHS, it was claimed yesterday. A number have joined a lobby group suspected of seeking to influence the type of treatments endorsed by rationing body NICE. The lobby group, the Commissioning Support Appraisals Service, is urging primary care trusts to sign up because they are under the pressure of 'tightening budgets'. It points out that they have to fund new drugs out of existing reserves, possibly at the expense of existing treatments. A promotional letter sent to the top managers of every primary trust suggests that more than 100 life-saving cancer drugs are in the pipeline.

The lobby group's actions are controversial because NICE is supposed to be independent of the Health Service and government. Health campaigners said it was wrong to waste public money on 'sinister' lobbying activities. Kate Spall, head of the Pamela Northcott Fund, which campaigns on cancer drugs, said: 'The subtext of the organisation seems to be to lobby NICE to ensure less cancer treatments are approved nationally. 'But believe me, NICE needs no encouragement to deny cancer treatments - they're doing a great job doing just that. 'Why aren't the managers lobbying the Government for extra funding for cancer treatments instead of fighting to ensure they are not approved? 'No wonder we have the worst access to treatment in Europe.'

Andrew Lansley, Tory health spokesman, said: 'It is extremely concerning that the Government has allowed NHS bodies to band together to spend taxpayers' money on a group whose intention seems to be to stop patients getting the life-saving drugs they need. 'It is utterly perverse when this money should be being spent on treating patients. 'The job of NICE is to undertake appraisals and offer advice on the basis of evidence not on the basis of lobbying. 'The last thing I want to see is primary care trusts using scarce NHS money to try and influence NICE appraisals into turning down what could be life-saving drugs. 'If they have clinical evidence to offer that is one thing, but if not they should stick to their job of providing services and treatments to the patients that need them.'

Professor Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist, said: 'The real tragedy is that we are so far behind Europe already that to put more restrictions on cancer drugs will make us fall even further behind. 'It's a crazy system of rationing, especially when PCTs have to fund newly-approved drugs out of existing budgets. 'But they should be pushing for more money - not trying to make the system work better for them.'

Andrew Wilson-Webb of the Rarer Cancers Forum said: 'NICE's job is to provide independent advice to the NHS. 'It is outrageous if NHS bodies try to influence this process by stealth.'

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: 'NICE invites patients, clinicians, manufacturers and primary care trusts to take part in consultations as it develops technology appraisal guidance. 'It is important that all these stakeholders engage in the process to ensure that the best possible decisions are made. The Commissioning Support Appraisals Service exists to help primary care trusts do this. 'NICE is an independent body which follows rigorous and transparent processes to consider all the available evidence and make the final decision on its guidance.' NICE declined to comment.

SOURCE



Staffing shortages compromising patient care, warn British nurses

More than half of the RCN's members, 55 per cent, find they cannot provide the level of care they want to because they are so busy and the same number say there aren't enough staff to meet patient needs. And two thirds, 61 per cent, of NHS nurses say their workload is too heavy and they are under too much pressure.

The RCN is today calling for all political parties to commit to guaranteeing safe staffing levels for all nursing shifts. They are issuing a manifesto, ahead of the coming general election, with a series of demands including giving nurses time to train, regulating the drinks industry and improving care for those with long-term health conditions.

Dr Peter Carter, head of the RCN, said: ''Today's report shows that nurses and healthcare assistants feel up against it; worn down and exhausted by the pressure to make efficiencies and frustrated by being prevented from delivering the quality of care they want to be providing. Staff are concerned that they are delivering the basics but are unable to provide the full range of quality care they would like. ''With an average of 1,800 nurses and health care assistants in each constituency, politicians of all parties must pay attention to our call for safer staffing levels and sustained investment in the NHS.''

The RCN's annual survey of nurses also found that with 200,000 nurses expected to retire in the next ten years and fewer nurses entering training the number of trained nurses available in the UK could fall.

Dr Carter said: ''The nursing workforce has grown in recent years but only just enough to keep up with rising demands on healthcare. We expect the next few years will be the most challenging for staff levels in decades, especially with the drive to provide more services in the community. ''There is considerable pressure to focus on short-term funding constraints and cut staff numbers without taking patient needs into consideration. However, policy makers must look at workforce in conjunction with ability to deliver high quality and safe care. As we've seen too often, where there are not enough nurses, patient care suffers.''

SOURCE



Majorcan hospitals a surprise for the English

What a difference extensive private medicine makes! Majorca (Mallorca) is a Spanish island in the Mediterranean which has a huge tourist industry



My son’s headmaster was on the blower. It was a Friday afternoon and the prognosis wasn’t great. Ollie had fallen during a sports lesson and his ankle had apparently swollen to the size of a tennis ball. We whizzed off to the school, stopping en route at the airport to pick up Sarah, a friend staying for the weekend, who happens to be a nurse. Palma has more hospitals than you can shake a thermometer at and since we’re entitled to use both state and private healthcare, we’re spoilt for choice.

Many Majorcans, even those on modest incomes, like to have state and private health care and at about half the cost of the UK or less, going private is a very affordable option.

We decided on the nearest hospital to our location and dashed in to paediatric accident and emergency. A smiling receptionist led us over to a state of the art children’s game consul and play area where she asked Ollie to wait until the doctor came. Only a few other patients were sitting in the palatial, marble tiled waiting zone.

A few minutes later a nurse arrived and carefully examined Ollie’s foot in a spotlessly clean surgery. She suggested x-rays. A charming young doctor arrived, had a chirpy conversation with Ollie about football and began examining him from head to toe. He wanted to check he hadn’t hurt his head in the fall. Two radiographers appeared with an English interpreter – just in case our Spanish wasn’t up to medical phraseology – and finally another doctor to give his verdict post the x-rays, and a prescription. A motherly nurse then bandaged up Ollie’s foot, pinching his cheek and telling him he’d be back on the playing field before he knew it. In just 45 minutes Ollie was x-rayed, diagnosed and treated.

As always we took this exemplary service in our stride but Sarah, a nurse at a busy NHS teaching hospital in London, was in some shock. “Am I dreaming?” she asked at least twice. We took her to the hospital out-patient canteen to recover. “I think I’ll have a red wine since it’s a Friday night,” my husband said cheerfully. The counter staff shared a joke with him and then asked politely whether he’d like his wine at room temperature or chilled. “You’d be lucky to get a cup of tepid tea in our hospital,” Sarah said.

On a roll, the next day we popped by out local state run medical centre in Sóller which offers a 24/7 service to its patients. We wanted to show Sarah a typical Majorcan local surgery. The receptionist chuckled when he saw Ollie’s bandaged foot. “What have you been up to my Ronaldo, too much football?” One of the doctors we know walked by, stopped and came back to shake our hands. “Do you need to see me?” he asked with some concern. “We’ve only got a few patients in the waiting room if you can hang on ten minutes.”

We explained that we’d already been to a hospital in Palma but wanted to show our friend around the clinic. “Be my guest,” he beamed. “We’re a humble clinic but we offer the best we can and it’s rare to wait longer than fifteen minutes for an appointment.”

Sarah wanted to know if the clinic had x-ray equipment. The doctor explained that if x-rays were needed an ambulance was called immediately to take patients to the nearest hospital. “It’s all part of the service,” he said. “We also have multi-lingual staff to deal with expat residents.”

She left the clinic reeling. “How,” she asked, “have the Majorcans got it so right?”

SOURCE



The British National Party says what others will not

Public services in Britain are hugely overstretched already. The roads are badly congested; There is standing room only on many trains; Hospitals are so stretched that the sick elderly are given short shrift; Housing prices are sky-high and the police have lost control of the streets at night. That is all in theory fixable but the Leftist government spends so much money on bureaucracy that there is little left for anything else. So immigration is going to make an abominable situation worse and all Brits know it. Saying so is another matter, however. You risk being called a "racist" if you do. The way the BNP has been demonized is an excellent example of that

When Karan Whiley, a 48- year-old mother-of-two and care home worker, went to her polling station last Thursday she was in no doubt about the issue concerning her most. “I don’t mind having immigrants who are genuine,” she said. “We live beside an Iraqi couple who have been through hell and are here because they were in fear of their lives. “But these Poles and Lithuanians are taking English jobs. They should stay in their own countries and fight for better jobs there.”

Like many of her fellow residents in the town of Boston, Whiley’s solution to the influx of foreigners — the town’s population has been swollen 25% in recent years by the arrival of an estimated 15,000 immigrants — is to vote for the far-right British National party.

The BNP is particularly strong in this corner of Lincolnshire. Last year the BNP candidate David Owens won a seat on the borough council with a tally that easily surpassed the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and United Kingdom Independence party votes put together. Last week Owens almost won a seat on the county council — losing by only 16 votes to a Conservative.

The people of Boston are not alone in their concern about migrants. A YouGov poll last month showed immigration as the issue of most concern to voters after the economy. That is unlikely to change in the near future. Figures to be released this week by the Office for National Statistics are expected to show that Britain’s population will expand by nearly 2m during the course of the next parliament alone, almost half because of immigration. It is likely to fuel anxieties about immigrants undercutting wages and putting extra strain on schools and hospitals.

While the mainstream parties squirm and try to avoid the issue, the BNP has been quick to capitalise on it. As well as seeing the election of its first two European MPs in June, the BNP now boasts about 50 local and county level councillors.

Its profile will be further boosted on Thursday when Nick Griffin, its leader, who is an MEP, appears on the BBC programme Question Time. Complaints about Griffin show no sign of abating: on Thursday Alan Johnson, the home secretary, challenged David Dimbleby, the programme’s host, to withdraw the invitation to the BNP because of its “foul and despicable” character.

That was highlighted last week when the party was ordered to change its constitution, which bans non-whites from being members. Such prejudice has led critics to label it neo-Nazi. Griffin reluctantly agreed to consider admitting non-white members only after facing the threat of legal action by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Why has the BNP been allowed to pander to the worries of the country without serious competition from the mainstream parties? And why is immigration still the issue that dare not speak its name in British politics?

FRANK FIELD, the Labour MP for Birkenhead and former welfare minister, is in no doubt about the causes of the BNP’s support. “A lot of Labour voters are now voting for them and we have allowed it to happen,” he said. “My only surprise is that the BNP vote hasn’t been even higher. For a lot of people they think parliament has turned their ears off, closed their eyes and sealed their mouths on the big burning issue.”

Field is co-chairman of the cross-party group on balanced migration. The group, jointly led by Nicholas Soames, the Tory MP for Mid Sussex, a former minister and former shadow defence secretary, believes action is needed to stop the population spiralling to unmanageable proportions.

That the population is getting bigger, and that it is due to immigration, is beyond dispute. In 2007 net immigration reached 237,000, although last year it dropped to an estimated 150,000 as the effects of the recession put off economic migrants. According to forecasters, the UK’s current population of 61.4m will grow by 10.5m over the next 22 years, and reach nearly 80m by 2056. “Every million more immigrants means creating a city the size of Birmingham,” said Field. “If we let immigration rise we will have more people sharing less public services.”

His group had calculated that even by 2013 England and Wales will need an extra 96,000 school places, two-thirds of which will be for children with at least one parent born outside the UK. The cost to the taxpayer of providing these places would be £1 billion over five years.

Both Labour and the Conservatives have produced policies to curb immigration. These apply, of course, only to people from outside the EU as those from most of the 27 member countries have the automatic right to live and work in the UK. The Poles and Lithuanians of Boston are here to stay — if they want. Migrants from EU countries are much more likely to visit the UK on a temporary basis for work, and then return home.

Analysis of the latest annual figures suggests that non-EU citizens account for almost 90% of the total of net immigrants, a trend that is expected to continue. Most come from Africa or Asia, with Somalia, India and Pakistan leading the countries from which those seeking British residency originate.

More HERE



Convicts teaching British children: How indecent assault and drug use are no bar to working in schools

Dozens of teachers with criminal convictions are being allowed to remain in the classroom, a shocking investigation has discovered. Members of staff who have been convicted of crimes including harassment, battery, assault, indecent exposure, indecent assault and possessing Class A drugs have not been banned from teaching. They have either escaped punishment entirely or just received a 'slap on the wrist' from the profession's watchdog, the General Teaching Council. This is despite a public furore three years ago about a loophole that allowed sex offenders to work in schools.

Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats under the Freedom of Information Act show that in the last five years 133 teachers were convicted of offences. Ninety-two had sanctions enforced against them by the GTC. Three were unlimited prohibition orders - two for driving dangerously and harassment and one for forgery. This means they can no longer work in state schools. There was also a prohibition order for 12 years for six counts of indecent assault. The 88 others either had shorter prohibition, suspension or conditional registration orders enforced.

However 14 teachers had no sanctions enforced against them at all. Five had convictions for assaults; three for driving under the influence of alcohol; two for possession of drugs; two for obtaining property by deception; one for harassment and one for conspiracy to defraud.

Twenty-seven were given reprimands that stay on their records for just two years. Five had convictions for possessing class A drugs; five for driving under the influence of alcohol; four for indecent exposure; four for assault; three for battery; two for theft; one for making a false statement; one for causing death by dangerous driving; one for not declaring offences to an employer and one for outraging public decency.

David Laws, Liberal Democrat schools spokesman, said: 'It's astonishing that teachers found guilty of serious crimes are getting nothing but a slap on the wrists from the Teaching Council. 'We need to be confident that appropriate action is being taken when a teacher commits a serious offence.' Margaret Morrissey, of the pressure group Parents Outloud, insisted: 'If they didn't want to lose their jobs, they shouldn't have broken the law.'

An inquiry concluded earlier this year that at least 50 sex offenders who pose an 'ongoing risk' to children were cleared to work in schools. Some were approved by ministers or senior officials to continue working with children despite evidence they had committed sex offences. An investigation - instigated in January 2006 by former Education Secretary Ruth Kelly - ordered the barring of 50 offenders permitted to work with children.

The law was tightened and now all adults convicted or cautioned for sex offences against children are automatically placed on List 99, the list of people banned from working with children.

A spokesman for the General Teaching Council said yesterday: 'Each hearing committee needs to determine whether the criminal conviction or caution is relevant to the teacher's role as a teacher. It also looks at how serious the offence was.'

SOURCE



Fears for 'exhausted' young children as British government steps up the push to start schooling at FOUR

It seems that this scheme allows for parent choice so it may be worthwhile. Brighter kids could well benefit from an early start but less bright kids could well be stressed by demands that are beyond them and they should probably be excused until age 6. Sadly, however, the less-bright parents of less-bright pupils may well seize the opportunity to "unload" their kids early

Parents will be encouraged to send their children to school at the age of four under a major shake-up of primary education. Schools Secretary Ed Balls wants youngsters to start classes in the September after their fourth birthday, instead of waiting until the compulsory schooling age of five. The move comes despite a major inquiry into primary education in England last week concluded that youngsters should not start formal learning until they were six.

The current school-starting age - a term after a child's fifth birthday - is already among the lowest in Europe. This compulsory schooling age will remain, but Mr Balls wants to change the mandatory School Admissions Code, which will effectively lower the starting age to four as parents are pressured to enrol their children earlier. The changes, published for consultation today, will come into force in February and apply to admission arrangements from September 2011.

In a concession to critics who believe youngsters are being schooled too early, parents will be able to choose whether their children start reception classes full or part-time in the September, January or April after their fourth birthday. But critics claim that thousands of exhausted young children will be turned off formal learning as a result of the overhaul.

Parents will be able to opt for a free full-time place in a nursery if they believe their son or daughter is not ready for school. They may also choose to wait until the compulsory schooling age of five.

The change comes after Mr Balls accepted Sir Jim Rose's primary curriculum review, published in April. It stressed that children should be able to start school from the earliest possible point after their fourth birthday.

Mr Balls said yesterday: 'It is important that children hit the ground running (at) school. There is clear evidence the sooner summer-born children start pre-schooling, the sooner they close the gap on their peers.'

However, the Cambridge Primary Review last week claimed there was no evidence. It did, however, say there were suggestions an early schooling start could do harm, and called for a delay in formal lessons until the age of six.

SOURCE



British schools told: Shut for three more holy festivals

Schools are being ordered to close on Muslim, Hindu and Sikh holy days despite objections from teachers. The directive by two London councils means the schools must shut for the annual celebrations of Eid-Ul-Fitr, Diwali and Guru Nanak's birthday in addition to the traditional Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter. The policy even affects schools with only a small number of Muslim, Hindu or Sikh pupils.

Headteachers have complained about the enforced holidays, arguing they should decide if the religious dates are marked with days off. The controversy surrounds Waltham Forest and Newham councils, which have publicised their school calendars for Autumn 2009-2010.

They both told schools to take off September 21 for Eid-Ul-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting. Diwali, which is celebrated by Hindus, was also included in the calendar as a holiday, but this year it fell on Saturday October 17. Guru Nanak's birthday is scheduled for a holiday on November 2. It is celebrated by Sikhs and Nanak's teachings form a central part of their scripture.

The policy in Waltham Forest affects all community primary and secondary schools in the borough, but not Church of England or Catholic schools. A review of the policy has begun after complaints from schools. Rachel MacFarlane, head of Walthamstow School for Girls, said the school is 'frustrated' by the holiday requirements.

Councillor Liaquat Ali, Cabinet member for children and young people in Waltham Forest, said it was important to teach children about different cultures and backgrounds 'as much as possible'. Nobody was available to comment from Newham Council yesterday.

SOURCE



Positive thinking is positively bad for you

It has always seemed obvious to me that approaching life with Christian humility rather than thinking you are Superman will get better results in most ways. You are much less likely to be seen as obnoxious, for a start. The sources the writer below quotes in support of her conclusion are not all as sound as one would like but the case against promoting high self esteem has long ago been made in the academic literature. See e.g. here --JR

There's an ad for Volkswagen being shown in cinemas at the moment. A good-looking man is driving an elegant car; in the background the soundtrack plays a song saying: 'With positive thinking, life won't let you down.' Harmless enough, you may think, but what makes the advertisement suddenly sickening is when the car passes a load of sheep on their way to the abattoir - they are all nodding their heads cheerfully in time to the music.

Yes, I know it's a joke, but there is still the implication that if you look on the bright side you, too, will be able to have a glamorous VW like the man in the ad, and, even if you're on your way to be slaughtered, a positive mind-set will make that jolly, too.

It won't. Indeed, this pre-occupation with thinking positively, with self-esteem and with the conviction that our thoughts somehow shape our futures is actually a dangerous obsession that leads not to happiness and fulfilment but rather disappointment and failure. A new book has just come out in America called Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

In it, the author Barbara Ehrenreich, a sociologist, actually goes so far as to consider whether positive thinking, in its most extreme forms, might have been partly responsible for the financial crash in the U.S. She suspects this because positive thinking and undue optimism has taken such a hold of America that anyone who dares to say: 'Hold on a moment! Is what we're doing really right?' is deemed a 'toxic' nay-sayer. And shunned.

There is a theory behind positive thinking called the law of attraction, that if you think bright, positive and optimistic thoughts, then bright, positive and optimistic things will be drawn to you. Similarly, if you're always looking out for faults, bad things will befall you. The obsession with this theory has, in the States, often resulted in negative-thinking people being sacked and instead of whistleblowers being seen as wise and sensible saviours who spot dangers ahead, they're usually vilified.

Barbara Ehrenreich started suspecting the power of positive thinking when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She would look at cancer websites and become enraged by the relentlessly Polyanna-ish attitude to it all. People were writing: 'Cancer gives my life meaning,' 'Breast cancer is a gift,' 'Cancer is your connection to the divine.'

Indeed, a while ago, I was so furious about the idea that good comes out of every disaster, that I wrote a book after my father died called You'll Get Over It - The Rage of Bereavement. It describes how when I'd read other books to help me come to terms with my father's death, I hurled most of them across the room when I got to the final chapters, which so often talked of death as being a gift, a blow that strengthens us and gives us wisdom and maturity. Utter tosh.

Positive thinking doesn't just force us to somehow celebrate when we get ill, but it also informs the mad idea that happy people don't fall sick. And yet that's so clearly not true.

One of the happiest people I've known died of breast cancer - Ruth Picardie, a girl who lit up her world with joy and optimism (her sister wrote a book recording her slow and painful death), while we all know old people who are longing to die but, despite persistent falls, pneumonia and so on, often appear to have no hope of respite from life in the immediate future.

Then there's this insidious view that positive thinking can actually 'beat' illness and disease. I despair when I hear my friends, having been diagnosed with cancer, saying that they'll fight it, when the truth is that fighting has nothing to do with it. When it comes to fatal disease, we are powerless. No matter how much time is spent visualising the cancer cells as little demons being slaughtered by our uplifting thoughts, it makes not a blind bit of difference, whatever bestselling spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra claim.

Apparently, one woman with cancer wrote to him because after doing all the visualisation exercises, she still suffered. He replied: 'Cancer is simply very pernicious and requires the utmost diligence and persistence to eventually overcome it.'

According to Barbara Ehrenreich: 'There is hope . . . which is longing. There is optimism, which is a natural feeling that things are going to go well, and there is positive thinking, which is a discipline, a way of forcing ourselves to think positively - if you expect things to get better, they will.' And it is this forcing yourself to look on the bright side which is the most pernicious.

In the UK an estimated one-third of top bosses used personal coaches in 2007. And companies these days are constantly trying to change the mood of their offices. They push people into 'bonding weekends' whether they naturally bond or not. They employ motivational speakers to address their staff. One employee had to attend training sessions which involved standing there shouting: 'I feel healthy! I feel happy! I feel terrific!' and then throwing the 'winning punch'.

And ever since Norman Vincent Peale gave us his The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952, the market has been flooded with books on the subject of thinking positively. Peale's spiel went like this: 'Visualise yourself as succeeding . . . whenever you think something negative, deliberately think of a positive thought to negate it, don't build up obstacles.'

In another book for gullible idiots, Secrets Of The Millionaire Mind, the author advises readers to place their hands on their hearts and say: 'I admire rich people! I bless rich people! I love rich people! And I'm going to be one of those rich people now!'

What is interesting about positive thinking is how delusional it is. Rather than being called 'positive thinking', it ought to be called 'magical thinking'. When I mentioned my thoughts to a therapist recently, she said: 'But of course positive thoughts are good!' A client had apparently come to her, unable to get a job, going bankrupt and miserable because her husband was leaving her. Rightly, the therapist pointed out to her that at least she had a roof over her head, had been offered another job, and was a terrific mother to her two children. 'It was good for her to think positively!' she said.

But, I pointed out, the therapist had not advocated positive thinking. She'd advocated realistic thinking, which is what we all need to focus on. Had the client come to her banging on about her brilliance, it would have been sensible for my friend to point out that yes, she was brilliant, but that didn't stop the fact that she was also bankrupt and her husband was leaving her.

It's interesting that in an age when the current mantras run thus: 'Every time a door closes another opens,' 'Every crisis is an opportunity in disguise,' 'When life hands out lemons, squeeze out a smile,' everything seems to be going wrong, and particularly for those in America and the UK, where positive thinking thrives. Far from being the greatest nation on earth, more children die in infancy in the U.S. or grew up in poverty than in many other industrialised nations. Healthcare is broken. It has the highest proportion of the population in prison, and is plagued by gun crime and personal debt.

However, in the days when the West did well - during and after World War II for example - we were all taught the opposite of positive thinking. We were encouraged 'not to get too big for our boots'. 'Who do you think you are? The Queen of Sheba?' our mothers would say, if we were too proud of any achievement. Or 'Don't let it go to your head.'

Interestingly, a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science showed that people with low self-esteem felt worse after repeating positive mantras about themselves.

In 1986, the Californian State Assembly appointed a task-force to investigate the subject of self-esteem, examining more than 30,000 research findings. The conclusion was that there was no correlation between levels of self-esteem and educational failure, crime, alcoholism, drug-taking, teenage pregnancies or child abuse. In other words, feeling good about yourself will not stop you going off the rails.

Indeed, the pre-occupation with self-esteem could actually be a disadvantage. In an international study, it was found that American students who ranked last in international comparisons of maths abilities ranked first when asked how they felt about their maths abilities. Positive thinking had completely deluded the entrants about their own abilities.

There's too much smiling going on these days. And smiling is starting to look very phoney. Whenever I see Tony Blair give one of his crazy rictus smiles, whenever I hear a mother say to her daughter, for the umpteenth time that day: 'Love you, you're brilliant,' I wince. Don't tell me to 'Have a nice day!' Thank you, I have other plans. More realistic ones.

SOURCE



Birthday cakes banned in British school

Because they are "unhealthy"

It was supposed to be a treat for Olivia Morris to share among her classmates on her ninth birthday. But no sooner had she blown out the candles on the chocolate cake than it was banned - for failing to comply with healthy eating rules. Staff informed Olivia's mother Rebecca that birthday cakes were no longer acceptable because they were at odds with the school's healthy living message. So, instead of sharing it round, Olivia was forced to take the cake home uneaten.

The treat was baked by her great-grandmother Eileen Morris, 79, who described the ban as 'crazy'. 'It was a lovely cake decorated with Maltesers and Jellytots, with chocolate icing and nine pink candles,' she said. 'I understand the need to teach children healthy eating, but surely a birthday cake is a special treat.'

Mrs Morris has been baking cakes for her family to take to school for four decades. The family tradition began when her own children Mark, now 48, and Jane, 52, started at Rockingham Infant and Junior School in Rotherham. When her five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren went to the same school she carried on sending in birthday cakes. Mrs Morris, from Kimberworth Park, Rotherham, said she blamed celebrity chef Jamie Oliver for the ban. He used the South Yorkshire town to launch his Ministry of Food TV show, vowing to teach its residents about healthy eating after parents were spotted passing junk food through school railings to bypass a ban on fast food.

Last night headteacher Heather Green stood by her decision to ban the cake. 'We love celebrating the birthdays of our pupils in class and in assemblies,' she said. 'At the same time, however, we are working really hard to promote healthy eating and lifestyles among our pupils. It is a tricky balance not to give a mixed message to pupils if we say to them "eat healthily at school" but at the same time we say "bring in cakes and buns to celebrate all our different events". 'We also take into account children with allergies and the pressure that some parents feel they are under to provide such treats.'

SOURCE





19 October, 2009

Senior British Leftist is a corrupt and dishonest crook

She was Britain's snooper in chief and the one who banned Michael Savage from Britain, grouping him with terrorists. She was also responsible for a law which criminalizes men for using prostitutes. The transaction between prostitutes and their clients is an example of shining honesty and probity compared to her actions



Jacqui Smith should quit her Commons seat now, pay back the £116,000 she claimed in housing expenses on her family home while lodging with her sister and face criminal charges. That is the damning verdict of her Redditch constituents who took part in a survey by The Mail on Sunday.

The former Home Secretary was last week forced to apologise by Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards John Lyon. He found her guilty of wrongly receiving the £116,000 by claiming her London lodgings were her main home, not the large family home she shares with her husband and young children in her Midlands constituency. But she has refused to stand down as an MP or return the money that the Commons sleaze watchdog said she was wrongly paid.

Nearly two out of three of the 500 people questioned by The Mail on Sunday in Redditch last week said she should give up her seat. More than three out of four said they would not vote for her at the next Election and nearly 90 per cent said she should repay the money. The poll also shows that the Conservatives are poised to steal the seat from Labour.

Hostility among local voters was expressed by Keith Andrews, 54, who said: ‘She is completely out of touch with working people, the people she’s supposed to represent.’ Cameron Edey, 18, said: ‘She’s given Redditch a bad name. The town used to be known for its needle museum, now it’s known for an MP claiming for her husband’s pornographic videos.’ Office worker Jane Murray, 39, said: ‘If it was you or I we would be facing criminal charges. She should be made to do the same. And she should have to pay the lot back, plus interest. I definitely will not be voting for her.’

Meanwhile, the brave couple who exposed Jacqui Smith’s second-home expenses scandal hit back last night after the MP and her BBC journalist sister Sara made an extraordinary attempt to smear them. Dominic Taplin, 46, and his wife Jessica, who live four doors from the London home where Ms Smith lodges with Sara, spoke out for the first time since their complaint was upheld in the official Commons investigation.

The Taplins rounded on Ms Smith for branding them liars and for her ‘vehement denial’ of their claim – upheld by the inquiry – that she did not spend most nights at her London ‘digs.’ They denounced a ‘preposterous’ claim by Sara, who falsely accused them of snooping on Ms Smith late at night and trying to sell their story. And they responded to Ms Smith’s attempt to claim they were politically motivated, pointing out neither was a member of the Conservative Party.

Businessman Mr Taplin said: ‘Jessica and I are pleased Mr Lyon’s inquiry has unequivocally shown our belief that Ms Smith did not stay the majority of her nights at her sister’s house in London was correct.’ Mrs Taplin, 33, a manager for a charity, said from the outset that a check of the records of police guards who protected Ms Smith would provide a ‘clear and simple indicator’ and confirm their story. Ms Smith spent three months trying to stop Mr Lyon accessing the police files. Finally, he forced her to release them – and they proved the Taplins had told the truth.

'Ms Smith and her office were vehement in their denial and it was implied we were making false allegations, but as we thought, once the police records were finally released to Mr Lyons they provided a clear and simple indicator of the nights stayed at the London address,’ the Taplins said yesterday.’ It was ‘completely untrue’ they had been paid for the story. And they were furious at the suggestion that they had spied on Ms Smith.

‘The idea of my wife or I checking the police presence every morning, noon and night is preposterous,’ said Mr Taplin. ‘We walk past the property daily to the train station, so it was impossible not to notice the policemen. ‘Finally the truth has come out – Ms Smith was in the wrong.’

The Smith sisters’ attempt to vilify Mr and Mrs Taplin is laid bare in Mr Lyon’s 110-page report. In fact, The Mail on Sunday’s original story in February, which disclosed how Ms Smith was abusing the second-home allowance, had nothing to do with the Taplins and came from other sources. They only became involved a week later when they were outraged by Ms Smith’s denials. Mr Lyon’s report centred on the gulf between Ms Smith’s claim that she spent most of the past four years at her Redditch home and files provided by the Met and West Mercia Police that told a very different story.

In a bitter and sarcastic letter to Mr Lyon, Sara, 39, made the wild – and totally false – claim that the Taplins had tried to make money out of the scandal. She said: ‘Our neighbour [Mrs Taplin] has said she would like the matter of Jacqui’s primary residence to be investigated by you. I wonder if by giving – not, selling surely – her “facts” to a newspaper first, she may have encouraged a few people to make up their minds about this matter already?’

The Taplins neither asked for nor were offered money by The Mail on Sunday. Ms Smith was unavailable for comment. Research in Redditch by Ross Slater, Helen Dowd and Christine Challand

SOURCE



Some British pigs are more equal than others

3,000 NHS staff get private care

THE National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists. More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling — all widely available on the NHS.

“It simply isn’t fair to have one service for staff and another for everyone else,” said Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, who obtained the figures. “If the NHS has to circumvent their own waiting lists the system isn’t working well enough. It’s an admission by the NHS that their own system isn’t able to respond to the mass of people desperate to get back to work.”

The number of health service employees sent to private healthcare facilities has more than doubled in the past three years. In 2006-7, 708 staff working for NHS trusts received private treatment at a cost of £279,000. Last year it increased to 1,641 at a cost of £828,413.

The health department defended the practice and said sending doctors, nurses and other key staff for private treatment helped to get them back to work. “If trusts want to get their staff back to work more quickly they can’t jump NHS waiting lists, so going private is an option,” said the spokesman. “There is evidence that early intervention in tackling sickness absence enables staff to return to work more quickly. “Other benefits include: reducing the risk of chronic illness that could result in ill health retirement, cost-saving on temporary staff and having a positive impact on staff health and wellbeing and, in turn, patient satisfaction.”

The East Midlands ambulance service recently set up a contract with a private occupational healthcare specialist worth £300,000 a year. It has sent its staff to the specialist for vaccines, health screening and to deal with needle injuries and blood tests.

Other big spenders include the south east coast ambulance service, which has sent more than 800 staff for physiotherapy, osteopathy and counselling at a cost of more than £279,000 over three years.

Humber mental health trust has spent more than £47,000 on private counselling, even though it specialises in offering this service along with psychiatric help. A spokeswoman said staff would feel awkward being counselled by NHS colleagues. “An appropriate and professional counselling and therapeutic service has to be free from any other existing pressures in respect of relationships and therefore cannot always be provided by an organisation,” she said. “Staff may also be referred externally due to peak of demand to meet the need in a timely manner.”

West Suffolk hospital has spent £56,000 over the past three years on private treatment for staff but said it would no longer do so.

SOURCE



British death panels "need more training"

Doctors and nurses need more training in how to care for people who are dying, Mike Richards, the Government's cancer tsar, has said, following concerns over the controversial 'death pathway' scheme

Prof Mike Richards, who was involved in the introduction of the Liverpool Care Pathway, said it was "essential" that medical staff were skilled in deciding who should be put on the scheme for those at the end of their lives. It follows concerns that patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely because they are incorrectly placed on the pathway, which can mean the withdrawal of food and fluids.

However, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Prof Richards said the Liverpool Care Pathway, worked well in the majority of cases. Prof Richards said: "The Liverpool Care Pathway is very valuable but its success depends on the skills and experience of staff who deliver it. It is therefore absolutely essential that every member of team delivering the pathway receives training."

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph last month, a collection of palliative care experts warned that patients may be wrongly diagnosed as dying and that putting them on the pathway became a self fulfilling prophesy. Since then families have come forward with concerns about the treatment of their dying relatives, sparking a debate about end of life care in hospitals.

Prof Richards warned that as the population ages and plans to help more people die at home are implemented, a wider range of clinicians will have to care for the dying. He said: "There are 1.3 million people working in the NHS and almost all of them have roles in end of life care. This includes GPs, hospital doctors, community and hospital nurses, physiotherapists and others. We need to increase the number of staff receiving training and a proportion of the funding for the end of life care strategy is dedicated for this.

"We train all clinicians in resuscitation though relatively few will use this skill in any one year. I would like to see a similar approach so that all staff are trained in end of life care. "Since the end of life care strategy was published 15 months ago we have succeeded in making training staff a priority for hospitals across the country but we need push this further so that we reach all staff groups." Prof Richards said e-learning modules were being developed to allow hundreds of thousands of staff to be trained in end of life care.

Meanwhile Marie Curie Cancer Care, which drew up the Liverpool Care Pathway, to help hospital staff provide the kind of end of life care that is provided in hospices, has called for mandatory training for all staff who use it. An audit showed in one in four cases family members were not told when their relative was placed on the Liverpool Care Pathway. The data also showed 84 per cent of nurses who use the pathway have received training. Thomas Hughes-Hallet, chief executive of the charity said: "We will be pressuring the NHS to ensure that the training does take place. We want 100 per cent of staff using the pathway to be trained. There is an issue around training, we can always get better." Mr Hughes-Hallett said the charity had never received a complaint about the LCP and it is now seen as a world-leading scheme which has been adopted in 17 other countries.

As part of the end of life strategy, surveys will be carried out among bereaved relatives of patients who have died to find out what they thought of the care family members received. The surveys which will begin next year will enable the Department of Health to compare the experiences of relatives of patients who died on the Liverpool Care Pathway with those who were not.

SOURCE



Whatever age British children start school, teaching will be dire

Education, education, education. Last week the chief executive of Tesco, the country’s largest private employer, said publicly that school standards were “woefully low”: teenagers leave school unfit for work and employers “are often left to pick up the pieces”. Sir Terry Leahy, the Tesco boss, is not alone in taking this bleak view: the head of the Confederation of British Industry said many of its members shared Leahy’s opinions. The chief executive of Asda commented that “no one can deny that Britain has spawned generations of young people who struggle to read, write or do simple maths”.

We do not need these top employers to tell us this. We know. The evidence for it is so familiar. Occasionally I wonder what, after all his promises, Tony Blair feels about his government’s betrayal of schoolchildren. Last week he was spotted in Westminster Cathedral visiting the bones of St Thérèse of Lisieux. Perhaps he was hoping for divine intervention on this and other matters.

Earthly intervention was on offer last week, however. Professor Robin Alexander of Cambridge University published his long-awaited independent review of primary education on Thursday and made some radical suggestions. His team’s view of what has happened in primary schools under Labour is exceptionally bleak: the report finds that successive ministers have imposed on teachers an unprecedented degree of control in a system with “Stalinist overtones”; it accuses the government of introducing an educational diet “even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools”.

What the report recommends is delaying formal education until children are six, concentrating before that on play-based learning; abolishing Sats and league tables and replacing them with assessments by teachers; extending teacher training; and introducing more specialist teachers for subjects such as languages and music.

One can only say, along with poor illiterate Vicky Pollard of Little Britain — an icon of failed education — “Yeah but no but yeah but no.”

Yes, of course “formal education” isn’t necessary or desirable for five-year-olds, if “formal” means what it usually does. Yes, of course the best education for young children should be fun and playful and interesting to them, if that is what a “play-based curriculum” means. Of course many children can easily be put off learning for ever by excessively formal education. Of course it is true that better, more enjoyable teaching is the way to improve attention and discipline among little children, rather than stricter rules. Of course the current curriculum for five-year-olds is absolutely daft in its manic, stupid, unrealistic scope — try reading it. Of course Sats are worse than useless and should be dropped. Of course league tables have been counterproductive. And of course it is true that this government has tried to micromanage teachers’ every working minute, driving many of them out of the profession; the word “Stalinist” is right.

Yes but no but: none of this is simple. I oppose any rigid, narrow education that blasts the joy of childhood and destroys children’s natural longing to learn — the teaching style of a Victorian elementary school. But I don’t believe that the teaching children get in year 1 these days is at all formal, in that sense — rather the reverse. I don’t imagine you see that kind of formal primary education anywhere now, except in private schools.

What can the report be getting at? I suspect that at the root of its objection to “formal” education is a dislike of the government requirement — much ignored — to teach all children phonics from year 1; that is, from the age of five or so. Primaries have been too focused on the three Rs, the report says, to which one can only reply that if this is true, there is something horribly wrong with their focus — a clear case of aiming low and missing. One does not have to be Thomas Gradgrind to believe that a primary education that doesn’t teach all children to read, quickly and well, within a year is a failed education. A child who can’t decode words confidently at seven is a child handicapped for life.

That doesn’t mean all children must start at four or five or six — many are not ready in any way, although others may already be fluent readers at three and four. But phonics itself — at the right age — can, with a well-trained, charismatic, fun-loving teacher, be good fun, as well as fast and efficient. It is forbiddingly formal only in the hands of poor teachers. Everything depends on the quality of the teacher. A bad teacher can put any child off anything. A bad teacher will be bad at play and play-based teaching, too, yet many have already retreated into it, imagining, wrongly, that it is easier. It is harder. Doing it badly — leaving deprived children who can hardly talk to grunt at each other in little groups — is worse than useless.

Bad teaching is at the heart of all this. It’s true the Labour ministers have tried to micromanage teachers in every way, but there was a reason. They recognised, like their predecessors, that there were too many inadequate teachers getting poor results. But rather than sack them or revolutionise teacher training, they chose to try to make education teacher-proof by micromanagement. Daft, but understandable. Micromanagement is what you do when you don’t trust the employee.

What’s wrong with the Alexander report, for all its right-minded ideals, is that its proposals depend on trusting teachers. And the truth is that teachers here and now cannot as a group be trusted. That’s why the curriculum and league tables and Sats were originally introduced, counterproductive though they proved. I apologise to the many good teachers out there. But the system has been brought low by poorly qualified, trained and motivated teachers, supported by their unions. Between them they managed to subvert the literacy hour, for example.

Ask any turnaround head teacher what the most important change has to be and it is invariably to sack the bad teachers first, which is always extremely difficult. Poor teachers have been tolerated too long: the Alexander report says there is no evidence for Ofsted’s claim that schools now have the best cohort of new teachers in history. No single thing is more urgent, or more neglected, in education policy today than to put a bomb under teacher training and the outdated, lazy orthodoxy that has almost wrecked English teaching traditions. That’s what is most needed. Teacher training, teacher training, teacher training.

SOURCE





18 October, 2009

Biased Britain again: Boy scouts must let in girls but Girl Guides OK to remain all-female

They ushered in a new age of equality when they finally opened up the organisation to girls after 100 years. But it seems not everyone in the Scouts was prepared for the change. The 19th Someries Scout group in Luton has remained defiantly single sex – and all nine leaders have been sacked as a result.

Andy Bates, Linda Faux and Philip Martin and six assistants were dismissed by Bedfordshire’s Scouting chiefs for excluding girls in contravention of the rule that became mandatory in January 2007. Dismayed by the decision, parents and children have begged district commissioner Kam Patel to allow them to stay on. They made their feelings clear at a recent meeting.

Mr Bates, 45, said: ‘To say the meeting was explosive would be an understatement. There was so much passion in that room. ‘Boys mix with girls at school and at home and there’s a demand for somewhere where they can just be with boys. ‘There are other groups nearby that accept girls, and we always point parents who want their girls to join in their direction. We’re not against girls but we don’t have enough female leaders and we felt uncomfortable about the implications of looking after lots of girls. ‘We made the decision with boys and their parents and everyone was in agreement.’

The leaders of the group, some of whom have received awards for their long service and dedication, were issued an ultimatum and told that if they did not allow girls to join the Scout, Cub and Beaver groups by September 6 they would have to leave. New leaders have been appointed and members have been told they can join different groups if they want to.

But Mr Bates is unrepentant. ‘Sometimes people have got to make a stand,’ he said. ‘It might only make a ripple but sometimes that’s how change starts.’

Scout Association spokesman Simon Carter said: ‘Basically it comes down to the fact that they are not prepared to uphold the principles of the association. ‘Allowing in girls is on the same levels as our policies on bullying or child protection. We believe it’s the best way to equip young people for today’s society.’

But parents of the group’s members continue to oppose the sackings. One, David Troughton, said: ‘The first we heard of it was that all the leaders had been replaced. There’s a lot of bad feeling and resentment, they’ve had no right of appeal. ‘Together the leaders have given 60 years’ service and have worked very hard to make the group successful. I feel they have been extremely badly treated and I know other parents feel the same way.’

The Girl Guides remains an organisation for girls only.

SOURCE



More bureaucratic stupidity from the British police

Girl, two, investigated by police for 'vandalism' after being accused of hitting car with stick

A two-year-old girl accused of hitting a car with a stick was investigated by police on suspicion of vandalism. The vehicle’s owner called the police claiming the child had deliberately damaged his car.

It has emerged that the toddler’s name and details are being held on file with Wiltshire Constabulary following the incident. Officers say they were obliged to respond to the call-out, even though the toddler, who could barely walk, was too young to be arrested or even formally questioned about her actions. Details of the child’s brush with the law last June emerged in a request to Wiltshire Police under the Freedom of Information Act.

A spokesman for the force said the family had already been engaged in a dispute with their neighbours, who owned the car, so police visited the little girl at her home in Chippenham, Wiltshire, to prevent these long-running tensions boiling over. Her details will not be added to the national police database but a force official admitted two was ‘an astonishingly young age’ to be visited by police. They added: ‘Within a street a couple of families were at severe loggerheads and one of the youngsters did something to one of the other family’s property. 'Police were called, they defused the situation and relevant advice was given.’

He added: ‘We aren’t talking about the child being arrested, or interviewed – that can’t happen – and the child’s DNA was not taken as we have no lawful power to do that. ‘The previous advice given to the parties involved in this street was, “You don’t go and sort it out yourself, you call the police”. ‘As far as we are concerned, they did the right thing and the matter was resolved to the satisfaction of the people whose property was alleged to have been damaged. It was a mountain out of a molehill anyway.’

But children’s rights groups have condemned the decision to treat the girl as a ‘suspect’. Michelle Elliott, founder of Kidscape, said: ‘You cannot have a child of two as a suspect. It is insane. It is stupid. This is the most bizarre thing I have heard of. It makes a mockery of the law.’ Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling added: ‘This is just madness.’

A spokesman for Wiltshire Police said: ‘Under the Home Office rules officers must attend where an allegation has been made – irrespective of the accused person’s age. ‘They are obligated to do so and they are also required to record the allegation as a crime. ‘But if the person is under the age of criminal responsibility they cannot be arrested. Had the little girl been ten years old, she could have been arrested.’

SOURCE



Lord Monckton Warns of Obama's Copenhagen Threat

Lord Christopher Monckton is one of the last true Britons, a countermoonbat who has been eviscerating the global warming hoax for years. At a speech at the Minnesota Free Market Institute Wednesday, he warned of what Comrade Obama is planning to do to us in Copenhagen. From the transcript at Watt's Up With That:

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they're going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won't sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word "government" actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, "climate debt" — because we've been burning CO2 and they haven't. We've been screwing up the climate and they haven't. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word "election" or "democracy" or "vote" or "ballot" occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn't appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it — Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He's going to sign it. He'll sign anything. He's a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he'll sign it.

The country that will be looted the most aggressively on behalf of socialist Third-World dictators for the greater glory of the radical left agenda will of course be the financially staggering USA.

So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I've read the treaty. I've seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.

But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire — it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it.

Even the BBC is now admitting not only that economic freedom doesn't make it be too hot out, but that the climate has been cooling despite rising levels of harmless CO2. But by the time awareness that the grand global warming crisis is a complete and absolute farce fully penetrates the public, the socialists who have taken control of our country will have us locked into this treaty, subjugating American sovereignty to unaccountable, anti-democratic global entities and subjecting American taxpayers to slavery not just to generate wealth for the bloated pigs in Washington, but to buy palaces for Robert Mugabe types around the world.

Here's where we find out if we deserve to call ourselves Americans. If the radicals running the government aren't stopped, we don't.

SOURCE

The actual text of the delusional "treaty" can be found here. I think Viscount Monckton takes it a little more seriously than he should. No treaty would be enforceable against the USA unless the government of the USA wished it.



Copper bracelet arthritis cure is a myth, say scientists



Copper and magnetic bracelets worn by thousands to alleviate arthritis are useless, researchers claim. The trial - the first scientifically-based study of its kind - raises doubts over the multimillion-pound alternative pain therapy industry.

Magnetic therapy and copper replacement are said to help a variety of ailments, including chronic joint pain caused by osteoarthritis and other musculoskeletal disorders. Manufacturers suggest the condition can be alleviated by re-balancing the body's magnetic field or topping up depleted copper levels though the skin. Many prefer to use the bracelets rather than drugs because there are no side effects.

But researchers from the universities of York, Hull, Durham, along with the NHS, found there was no difference in symptoms whether patients wore magnetic straps or de-magnetised ones. They asked 45 arthritis sufferers aged 50 and over to wear four wrist straps in turn over a 16-week period.

They tested out a commercially available magnetic wrist strap, a weak magnetic wrist strap, a de-magnetised wrist strap and a copper bracelet. Their pain levels were rated on an internationally recognised score index and their use of medication noted, says a report published in the latest issue of the journal Complementary Therapies in Medicine. No difference was found in terms of their effect on pain between the four devices, with similar results found for joint stiffness and need for medication.

Stewart Richmond, of York University, who led the trial, said: 'It appears that any perceived benefit obtained from wearing a magnetic or copper bracelet can be attributed to psychological placebo effects. 'People tend to buy them when they are in a lot of pain, then when the pain eases off over time they attribute this to the device. However, our findings suggest that such devices have no real advantage over placebo wrist straps that are not magnetic and do not contain copper.' Dr Richmond added that although some arthritis sufferers do have lower copper levels, this is an effect of the condition rather than a cause.

Magnetic and copper bracelets typically cost between £30 and £50, with the industry worldwide worth around £2.45billion. Dr Richmond said: 'I realise this may dispel the myth and puncture a few balloons, but I don't want to see people wasting their money.'

SOURCE





17 October, 2009

British anti-immigration party forbidden to limit its membership to "Indigenous Caucasians"

Many American organizations -- such as the Congressional black caucus -- would be illegal under British law. No freedom of association in Britain. But the law is not evenly enforced, of course. When, for instance, will Britain's Black Police Officers Association be taken to court for racism?

The British National Party was forced to amend its constitution yesterday so that it does not bar people from joining because of their race or religion. The move came after the Equality and Human Rights Commission started a county court action against the party, accusing it of breaching race relations laws. Proceedings at Central London County Court were adjourned after lawyers said that Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, would put a revised constitution before a BNP meeting next month. Robin Allen, QC, for the commission, said Mr Griffin had also agreed not to accept new members until the revised constitution was in place.

The move was seen as a victory by the commission. John Wadham, its legal director, said: “We are pleased the party has conceded this case and agreed to the commission’s requirements. We believed the BNP’s constitution was unlawful, because its membership criteria discriminated on grounds of ethnic minority status and colour. This is not a political issue. It is about obeying the law, which everyone is obliged to do.” He said that the commission had statutory powers and duties to stop discrimination: “We could not ignore a political party acting unlawfully.”

As they left court, Chris Roberts, the BNP’s eastern regional spokesman accused Mr Wadham of being a “disgrace” and warned he would face a charge for “crimes against the British people”. Mr Roberts said: “I don’t know what the membership will vote to do, but I think we will take a commonsense approach.”

He said the BNP had been forced to give the undertakings by the “liberal Marxist establishment” which wanted to see it put out of business because it was winning seats in elections. “This will not change our core beliefs,” he said.

The case was adjourned until January 28 when Judge Paul Collins will determine if the constitution has been revised appropriately. The Equalities Bill, which is going through Parliament, may in any case force the party’s hand, as it removes a provision that the BNP relies on to justify membership criteria.

Mr Wadham said: “It is unfortunate that the BNP spent several months before conceding and dealing properly with our legal requirements.” In the court order, the BNP agreed to use all reasonable endeavours to revise its constitution so it does not discriminate on any “protected characteristic” — for example on the grounds of race, ethnic or religious status — as defined in clause four of the Bill.

SOURCE



BBC attack on comedy

I can't remember when I last sat down and watched, from beginning to end, a BBC situation comedy. It was possibly 20 years ago, and it was probably Blackadder. Yes, I once chanced upon a more contemporary offering, but it was so dire it was hard to believe anyone but the irremediably tragic could possibly be watching it.

Now these scarcely funny things are destined to become unfunnier still, since the BBC has decreed that its comedies are not to be ''unduly intimidatory, humiliating, intrusive, aggressive or derogatory''. John Howard Davies, who used to run BBC comedy, pointed out that this is the sort of absurdity that happens when a committee decides guidelines. An individual exercising editorial judgment is far preferable, especially if that individual has been chosen because of his or her connection with the real world, and what makes people laugh in it.

I have occasionally thought that I used to find programs put out by the BBC funny because I was so much younger when I saw them. However, watching re-runs of old comedy programs, I realise I was wrong: they were, plainly and simply, very funny. The famous Fawlty Towers episode in which Basil insults the Germans fails every one of the new guidelines. It is racist, intimidating, humiliating, mocks Spaniards, Germans, and the mentally ill, and commits other offences too numerous to mention. It is also dementedly funny, even after repeated viewings over 30 years.

Comedy used, of course, to be able to make certain assumptions: among them was a shared social experience and a common sense of humour born out of that and a common culture. The BBC has its own view of what the things-in-common today are, and, in its obsession with ''diversity'', there are very few of them.

The new guidelines were prompted by the idiotic moment when the BBC broadcasters Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand rang up an elderly actor - the same intimidated Spaniard from Fawlty Towers - and mocked him over the carnal behaviour of his granddaughter. We all know that no wide-ranging guidelines were necessary in response to this: just the simple editorial application of the rules of good taste. Yet the ''committee'' so correctly derided by Howard Davies has seized the opportunity to issue draconian new rules about a large number of things that cannot now appear in any comedy.

After 70 or so years of influencing and shaping the definition of the national sense of humour, the BBC now seems to have forfeited its ability to do that. As a result, our sense of humour will have to carry on being forged in other ways, as it was before the BBC brought us the Goons and Monty Python and the rest: in the workplace, in the home, by the written word, in pubs, in clubs, in theatres, indeed, in every place where real human beings meet each other and make conversation.

All the funniest things the BBC ever did were based on some sort of humiliation: usually, self-humiliation. I don't just mean Fawlty Towers: I think of my desert island sitcom, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which ran ragged a middle-aged man, played exquisitely by Leonard Rossiter, who wanted to have an affair with his secretary and thought his mother-in-law was a hippopotamus. Or Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, in which Frank Spencer - like Reggie Perrin and Basil Fawlty, one of the great comic creations - was humiliated (quite often aggressively, with lashings of intimidation) in almost every episode. Nobody who watched it took it very seriously; everybody who watched it recognised the type. Such creations remind us that the only way, sometimes, to cope with aspects of life that are irritating, depressing or infuriating is to magnify their absurdity by means that will sometimes verge upon the cruel, and then laugh at them.

I don't know what, indeed, there will be left for us to chortle at.

White, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual males (rather like Reggie Perrin) seem to be safe, but that may change in the next set of guidelines, as the censors realise that they have feelings, too.

It makes me realise that my wife is right when she says that once you get past the age of 40, there isn't really anything on the BBC for you. Except Gardeners' World, of course: and we should make the most of that until someone realises how much it discriminates against those who don't have gardens, and who might feel humiliated by the lack of one.

SOURCE



Some hope for British conservatism?

The speaker talked of dreams. He communicated a compelling personal narrative, including a description of profound pain. He also told his enthusiastic audience, “It’s time to shake things up!” A 43-year old rising political star clearly made a connection with the crowd - further cementing his leadership role over a party poised to bring change they believe in to the nation they all love.

His name is David Cameron and the moment described is his appearance and speech at the Tory (Conservative) Party Conference in Manchester, England this past Thursday. Most polls in the U.K. indicate a trend toward the Tories as the realm moves toward its next national election, which will most likely be held by the first week of June 2010.

The Conservatives have been out of power since 1997, when Tony Blair and the Labour Party gained control. These have been wilderness years. But the party is now re-energized and poised to pull off an electoral repudiation of many of the big-government trends of the past decade. Ironic, huh?

Consider these nuggets from Cameron’s Manchester speech – and see if you don’t find yourself scratching your head and wishing America had a singular conservative voice to articulate a compelling vision for the future:

“We will need to confront Britain’s culture of irresponsibility and that will be hard to take for many people. And we will have to tear down Labour’s big government bureaucracy, ripping up its time-wasting, money-draining, responsibility-sapping nonsense.”

“It is government that has gotten us into this mess. Why is our economy broken?” he asked, “Because government got too big, spent too much and doubled the national debt.”

“Why is our society broken? Because government got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility. Why are our politics broken? Because government got too big, promised too much and pretended it had all the answers.”

He ridiculed “this idea that for every problem there’s a government solution for every issue, for every situation a czar…”

And – my favorite line of all: “Do you know the worst thing about their big government? It’s not the cost, though that’s bad enough. It’s the steady erosion of responsibility…we are not going to solve our problems with bigger government. We are going to solve our problems with a stronger society. Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger country. All by building responsibility.”

Oh – and, “Complicated taxes, excessive regulations - they make life impossible for entrepreneurs. What are you doing to make it easier to start a business? Easier to take people on? What are you doing to make regulation less complicated? To make locating a business more attractive?”

OK – one more passage, then some comments: "The truth is, it’s not just that big government has failed to solve these problems. Big government has all too often helped cause them by undermining the personal and social responsibility that should be the lifeblood of a strong society. Just think of the signals we send out. To the family struggling to raise children, pay a mortgage, hold down a job. Stay together and we’ll give you less; split up and we give you more.”

After a dozen years of Labour administration in the United Kingdom, one child in six is in a family where no-one works – the highest such rate in Europe. This is not due to job scarcity. These are cases where readily available welfare provisions have undermined the need and desire to work, even when jobs have been available.

Basically, Mr. Cameron was challenging his party – and the nation – with a logic that could only be missed by the clueless or members of the Nobel prize committee (pardon the redundancy), that “the more we as a society do, the less we will need government to do.” He is championing an idea whose time has come once again: personal responsibility.

More HERE



Now it is Leftist-leaning academics who find Britain's schools "Stalinist"

The central government dictatorship of what schools will teach is certainly reminiscent of Stalinism but the complete destruction of discipline is anything but.



The findings in the report below were almost entirely predictable from the known biases of the big-brained Prof. Alexander. He wants teaching to be "dialogic", which sound fair enough. After all what teaching is NOT mostly dialogue? When I was teaching High School, I would spend 5 minutes at the beginning of the period telling kids something and the remainder of the period in dialogue -- with them asking me questions and me using questions to probe their understanding of the matter.

But Prof. Alexander wants teaching to be far more unstructured than usual, conducted on lines similar to a Socratic dialogue. And, like all "innovative" methods that I know of, that might have some benefit in the hands of highly skilled and dedicated teachers. But in routine use it seems likely on most occasions to lead simply to teachers who don't teach

The state's 'Stalinist' control over teaching is condemning young children to an inadequate education, a damning report claims today. An obsession with testing and basic skills has 'politicised' schools and dragged down standards, the six-year independent inquiry warns. It says primary pupils now receive a less rounded education than those in Victorian times. It calls for a radical overhaul of primary schooling, including the raising of the starting age from five to six and the scrapping of SATs tests and league tables. Youngsters would instead be assessed in all subjects at the end of primary school, and by their teachers instead of outside examiners.

The traditional system of a single class teacher covering every subject would also be phased out. Pupils would retain a class teacher but more lessons would be taken by specialists in specific subjects. Six-week summer holidays should be shortened because children are left unsupervised for too long, the review suggests. It also says all parents should have access to advice on how to encourage their children to learn.

The review, led by Cambridge don Professor Robin Alexander, is the biggest to cover primary education for 40 years. The Government's claim that standards have risen is 'unsafe' and the impact of increased taxpayers' investment is less than might have been expected, the report says. In fact, a rigid focus on literacy and numeracy at the expense of science, history, geography and the arts may have 'depressed standards'.

One teacher who gave evidence to the Cambridge Primary Review said it amounted to a 'state theory of learning', policed by Ofsted and the SATs testing regime. The report says: 'The Stalinist overtones of a "state theory of learning" enforced by the "machinery of surveillance and accountability" are as unattractive as they are serious.' It adds: 'Many experienced and able teachers resented this degree of control of their work, its inflexible and monolithic character, and the overt politicisation of the act of teaching. 'Pupils will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers are merely expected to do as they are told.'

Professor Alexander attacks the official notion that the function of primary schools is to teach children 'to read, write and add up'. 'Such a diet, after all, is even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools whose practices most people claimed the country had outgrown,' the report says.

The review went on to condemn other aspects of the system, including the school starting age of five - which ministers have proposed should be reduced to four. Dame Gillian Pugh, chairman of the review's advisory committee, said there 'was quite a lot of evidence' that this could do harm. The report suggests children should follow a play-based curriculum at school or nursery until six, with formal primary schooling lasting from six to 11.

It calls for SATs to be scrapped, but that assessment in some form should remain at the end of primary schooling and should cover all subjects, including geography, history and the arts.

It says the curriculum should be overhauled so pupils study eight subject 'domains', broadly reflecting traditional disciplines. The proposals drew a mixed reaction from the Conservatives. Tory schools spokesman Nick Gibb agreed that the 'wave of bureaucracy over the past decade has been deeply damaging'. But he said the Conservatives do not accept its proposals for changing the curriculum or raising the school starting age.

Schools Minister Vernon Coaker said: 'The report is at best woolly and unclear on how schools should be accountable to the public - we're clear that it would be a retrograde step to return to days when the real achievements of schools were hidden.'

SOURCE



Children start school too young — wait till they’re 6, British "experts" say

This is rubbish, as is any fixed age for starting school. It all depends on the particular kid. Some can be ready at 4, others at 6. Admission to a school should be based solely on a judgment of how capable each kid is. But considering the individual is way beyond the capacity of Leftists, of course

Formal schooling should be delayed until children reach 6, according to the biggest review of primary education for more than 40 years. The Cambridge Primary Review, published today, says that five-year-olds should continue with the play-based curriculum used in nursery schools. Trying to teach literacy and numeracy at such an early age is “counterproductive” and can put children off school, according to the committee that produced the report.

Professor Robin Alexander, the report’s editor, called for a debate about whether to raise the age of compulsory schooling, which has been set at 5 since 1870. But the review was more concerned about the style of learning offered in state schools.

Successive governments’ insistence on the earliest possible start to formal schooling went against the grain of international evidence, he said. Children who started school at the age of 6 or 7 often overtook English pupils in tests of reading before the start of secondary education.

Most continental countries start school later than in Britain, preparing children for formal classes through extended nursery education. The review proposes a similar model for England, continuing the current Foundation Stage for an extra year and following it with a single stage of primary education taking children to the age of 11. The suggestion was not supported by the Government or the Opposition.

Dame Gillian Pugh, who chaired the review’s advisory committee, said: “If you introduce a child to too formal a curriculum before they are ready, you are not taking into account where children are in terms of their learning and their capacity to develop.”

A separate review, by Sir Jim Rose, that was commissioned and accepted by the Government, called for four-year-olds to go straight into primary reception classes. But Sir Jim recommended that parents be able to defer their child’s entry to school by up to a year if they felt they were not ready.

Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools, who undertook a more limited review of primary teaching for the previous Conservative Government with both Professor Alexander and Sir Jim, said he feared a later start would lead to lower standards: “It is reasonable when children arrive at school for the emphasis to be on socialisation, but I see no reason to postpone the start of formal learning.”

John Bangs, of the National Union of Teachers, described the proposal as an “innovative idea” that deserved support: “We have seen problems with early admission to reception classes. It is an absolutely crucial stage of a child’s development and I think there is merit in extending the Foundation Stage.” The 600-page report, entitled Children, their World, their Education, says that many practitioners believe that the principles shaping pre-school education should govern children’s experience of primary school at least until the age of 6, if not 7. The Welsh Assembly has already extended the Foundation Stage to the age of 7.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said that it would be a backward step not to make sure children were learning as well as playing through the Foundation Stage and beyond. “It is vital to get children playing and learning from an early age.”

Funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and based at the University of Cambridge, the review took six years and drew on 4,000 pieces of evidence. It depicts primary schools struggling with interference from the Government and its agencies, but remaining “fundamentally in good heart” .

Professor Alexander said: “There is room for improvement but, after 20 years of pretty continuous change and reform, how could it be otherwise?” The introduction of more specialist teachers would help schools cope with the modern curriculum, he said. Professor Alexander described the “crisis of childhood” as a media obsession and said it was evident mainly among those from poor backgrounds, who were farther behind their peers than those in comparable countries.

The review accuses the Government of abandoning the convention that it did not dictate how children were taught, and imposing a “state theory of learning” through its literacy and numeracy strategies. Such policies’ “Stalinist overtones” had produced an air of pessimism and powerlessness in the teaching profession. Existing tests at the end of primary school should be scrapped, the review says, and replaced by assessment of the whole curriculum, rather than just English, mathematics and science.

It describes politicians’ exclusive focus on ensuring that children can read, write and add up as narrower than that in Victorian elementary schools.Among the changes recommended by the review are longer training for graduates intending to teach in primary schools which, it says, should take two years not one, and a review of special educational needs. Long summer holidays might also be reduced.

Professor Alexander said that the review was intended to inform long-term planning, not “pre-election pointscoring”. The main parties nevertheless seized on the findings.

Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister, said: “We agree that the wave of bureaucracy over the past decade has been deeply damaging and we must trust teachers more. We also agree that we need more specialist training for primary teachers.” However, the Conservatives would not support a delay in the start of formal schooling.

Vernon Coaker, the Schools Minister, said: “It’s disappointing that a review which purports to be so comprehensive is not up to speed on changes in primaries. The world has moved on since this review was started.”

Mr Coaker added: “We’re putting in place fundamental reforms following Sir Jim Rose’s primary review, to make the curriculum less prescriptive. A school starting age of 6 would be completely counterproductive — we want to make sure children are playing and learning from an early age and to give parents the choice for their child to start in the September following their fourth birthday.”

SOURCE





16 October, 2009

Horrible British bureaucrats bar ambulance crew from helping girl, 9, with fractured skull 'because they were having their lunch'

And they are not backing down either. To their socialist brains, what they did was right. Fortunately, the paramedics themselves had a conscience

Ambulance staff battling to save a nine-year-old car crash victim were told the nearest back-up crew could not help as they were on their lunch break.

Bethany Dibbs was struck by a car as she crossed the road on her scooter and ended up in a coma with a fractured skull. An ambulance crew arrived and called for help, only to be told by their operator that under strict meal break regulations the closest additional crew still had a few minutes left on their lunch break. The paramedics were informed it would take 20 minutes for another crew to arrive.

In the end one of them called their colleagues directly and they abandoned their lunch and raced to help. They arrived only five minutes after the original crew and took Bethany to hospital.

An ambulance worker, who asked not be named, said: 'There isn't one staff member who would not go, but we have to be given two 30-minute meal breaks and can't be interrupted. It's a joke.'

Bethany's father Stephen 48, of Poole, Dorset, said: 'The world really has gone mad. 'My little girl was lying unconscious in the road and they are quoting statutory health and safety regulations? Every second counts in that situation. 'Bethany is recovering but she's still got a long way to go. We're waiting to find out whether she has any long-term brain damage.' Mr Dibbs added: 'I can't fault the paramedics. They were fantastic. It is the system.'

A spokesman for the South Western Ambulance Service Trust said it took its health and safety duties seriously. He added: 'In line with national guidelines which must be adhered to by all ambulance trusts, it is important all staff have dedicated 30-minute rest breaks which cannot be interrupted.'

SOURCE



Half of British hospitals do not fully meet core care standards, says regulator

Almost half of hospitals fail to meet fully the core standards of care despite a decade of Government investment in the NHS, according to the health regulator’s annual report. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) warns today that more than 40 health trusts are at risk of being refused new licences to operate, which will be issued next April.

The report, an annual assessment of quality of care and financial management of NHS organisations, concludes that while there have been significant improvements in waiting times, tackling superbugs and controlling budgets, many trusts are still failing the basic requirements of good care. These include the number of patients having operations cancelled, heart disease care, record keeping, infection control and child protection.

Cynthia Bower, the chief executive of the CQC, warned that there needed to be rapid improvements to meet the legal demands of the new registration scheme, which could see failing trusts hit with a range of sanctions, including fines, suspension of services and prosecution.

The registration process risks embarrassing the Government, which has spent an extra £50 billion in real terms on the NHS in the past ten years. It will take place weeks before a general election, widely expected for May 6.

The annual appraisals rate every trust in England from “weak” to “excellent” based on information provided by trusts, inspections, patient feedback and audits of hospital finances. Of the 392 organisations assessed in the year to March 2009, including hospital, primary care, mental health and ambulance trusts, only 58 scored “excellent”, compared with 100 last year. However, there was a rise in the number that scored “good” (186) and slight decreases in the numbers that were “fair” (128) and “weak” (20).

Ms Bower said that the most worrying trend was the number of trusts that continued to “bump along the bottom” despite repeated warnings. “They must do better for their patients. I want to ring alarm bells in the boardrooms of these organisations,” she said. She added that part of the fall in top ratings was down to a more rigorous focus on key issues such as hygiene and child protection.

Politicians and health specialists questioned why the NHS was improving so slowly and warned that the current economic climate would only make improvement harder. The Government set out essential care benchmarks to be met by all trusts as a matter of urgency more than five years ago in Standards for Better Health.

Niall Dickson, chief executive of the King’s Fund, said that the minority of trusts that repeatedly failed to sort out basic issues such as hygiene, patient safety and staff training were a cause for concern. He added that given current standards had been achieved in a period of funding growth, the big challenge would be maintaining the status quo.

The CQC raised registration concerns about a total of 47 trusts, 20 of which are rated “weak” and 27 that have not been higher than “fair” over the past four years. It said that the drop in the number of hospitals fully meeting the core standards — from 69 per cent in 2007-08 to 59 per cent this year — also needed highlighting.

A total of 37 trusts were rated “double excellent” on quality and financial management, including the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, which achieved the standard for the fourth year in a row. Only one trust, Barking Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust, scored a “double weak” — an improvement on the six trusts receiving the rating last year.

The regulator has written to 54 trusts to congratulate them on consistently strong performances or improvements. “Those rated ‘excellent’ deserve to be commended,” Ms Bower said. “But it is clear that some trusts are struggling and that some issues are proving tough nuts to crack. It is clear that many have significant work to do and a short time in which to do it.”

Andrew Lansley, the Conservative health spokesman, said that the regulator’s report showed that the level of improvement was not as it should be. “Given the increases in taxpayers’ money spent on the NHS, patients rightly expect that basic standards will be consistently met and will actually improve year on year,” he said. “This has clearly not happened.”

Mike O’Brien, the Health Minister, said that the “tough assessment” showed improving standards across the NHS. He said that the Government expected “immediate action” to prepare trusts rated as “weak” for the new standards next year.

SOURCE



'We're Going to Let You Die'

Liz Hunt of London's Daily Telegraph reports on an even more chilling euphemism used in a country that long ago instituted "health-care reform":

"Mrs ------- has breathing difficulties," the night manager told her. "She needs oxygen. Shall we call an ambulance?"

"What do you mean?" my friend responded. "What's the matter with her?"

"She needs to go to hospital. Do you want that? Or would you prefer that we make her comfortable?"

"Make her comfortable." Here's what that meant:

Befuddled by sleep, she didn't immediately grasp what was being asked of her. Her grandmother is immobilised by a calcified knee joint, which is why she is in the home. She's a little deaf and frail, but otherwise perky. She reads a newspaper every day (without glasses), and is a fan of the darling of daytime television, David Dickinson. Why wouldn't she get medical treatment if she needed it?

Then, the chilling implication of the phone call filtered through--she was being asked whether her grandmother should be allowed to die.

"Call an ambulance now," my friend demanded.

The person at the other end persisted. "Are you sure that's what you want? For her to go to hospital."

"Yes, absolutely. Get her to hospital."

Three hours later, her grandmother was sitting up in A&E [the accident-and-emergency ward], smiling. She had a mild chest infection, was extremely dehydrated, but was responding to oxygen treatment.

As Hunt notes, "Withdrawal of fluids (and drugs) is one of the steps on the controversial palliative care programme known as the Liverpool Care Pathway, which has been adopted by 900 hospitals, hospices and care homes in England."

More here



Home education vs. the British bully-boy state

The presumption of guilt is eating it`s way into our lives: Home Education is the latest victim.

As a parent you are a suspect in the crusade against child abuse. That is the message to Home Education from this government.Through a staged Review and now onto a Select Committee, the drive has been to find ways to justify an assault on Home Ed., taking away parental rights, enforcing child interviews alone and invading the family in a way that singles out Home Ed. as a "prime suspect".

Yet the very idea that Home Education could be harbouring child abuse is one manipulated from Local Authorities because the Government wanted to hear something that would enable it to invade Home Ed. Certainly, cases like Baby P. have made the system determined to seek out and stamp-out child abuse whatever the cost, but such cases have not been anything to do with Home Ed., so why single out one group for inspection?

The drive to stamp out child abuse should not cause abuse of children, or their parents, yet this is what compulsory interviewing of childen will achieve. Home Ed. is a sanctuary of love and good education, it nurtures children and allows them to learn and develop at their own speed. Many children are bullied in school and parents deregister their kids to protect them from further harm. We can only imagine what harm will be done to these kids when they are forced into interview alone, not to mention the damage if the National Curriculum is imposed along with government educational standards.

Currently, Local Authorities are widely acting ultra vires in regard to Home Ed. They are lying to parents, purporting to have powers under the law that they do not have, trying to bully children into returning to school. This really is a bully-boy State.

SOURCE



Whatever happened to global warming? How freezing temperatures are starting to shatter climate change theory

Article below from Britain's mainstream "Daily Mail"

In the freezing foothills of Montana, a distinctly bitter blast of revolution hangs in the air. And while the residents of the icy city of Missoula can stave off the -10C chill with thermals and fires, there may be no easy remedy for the wintry snap's repercussions. The temperature has shattered a 36-year record. Further into the heartlands of America, the city of Billings registered -12C on Sunday, breaking the 1959 barrier of -5C.

Closer to home, Austria is today seeing its earliest snowfall in history with 30 to 40 centimetres already predicted in the mountains.

Such dramatic falls in temperatures provide superficial evidence for those who doubt that the world is threatened by climate change. But most pertinent of all, of course, are the growing volume of statistics. According to the National Climatic Data Centre, Earth's hottest recorded year was 1998. If you put the same question to NASA, scientists will say it was 1934, followed by 1998. The next three runner-ups are 1921, 2006 and 1931.

Which all blows a rather large hole in the argument that the earth is hurtling towards an inescapable heat death prompted by man's abuse of the environment. Indeed, some experts believe we should forget global warming and turn our attention to an entirely differently phenomenon - global cooling.

The evidence for both remains inconclusive, which is unlikely to help the legions of world leaders meeting in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new climate change deal.

There is no doubt the amount of man-made carbon dioxide, the gas believed to be responsible for heating up the planet, has increased phenomenally over the last 100 years.

For the final few decades of the 20th century and as the atmosphere's composition changed, scientists recorded the planet was warming rapidly and made a positive correlation between the two. But then something went wrong. Rather then continuing to soar, the Earth's temperature appeared to stabilise, smashing all conventional predictions. The development seemed to support the view of climate change cynics who claimed global warming was simply a natural cycle and not caused by man.

Some doubters believe that the increase was actually down to the amount of energy from the Sun, which provides 98 per cent of the Earth's warmth.

Previously, the fluctuating amount of radiation given out by the sun was thought to play a large role in the climate. But Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, who was part of the team to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, studied solar output - the heat leaving the sun's surface - and cosmic ray intensity over the last 40 years, and compared those figures with global average surface temperature. He told the BBC: 'Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity.'

Scientists have intensified the search for alternative explanations. Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University believes the key to the connumdrum may be the temperature of the world's seas. Figures show the Pacific Ocean has been cooling over the last few years, and Easterbrook's research shows a correlation between this and global temperatures. He says the oceans have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically, known as Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). And after a 30-year heating cycle in the 1980s and 1990s, pushing temperatures above average, we are now moving into a cooler period.

Professor Easterbrook said: 'In the last few years [the Pacific Ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down. 'The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.' His figures show that the global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), stressed the impact of the ocean currents in the North Atlantic - a phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation. He believes we may be in a period of cooling - but that it will be temporary before global warming reasserts itself. He said the NAO may have been responsible for some of the rapid rise in temperatures of the last three decades. 'But how much? The jury is still out,' he said.

So is the sun really going down on global warming? The Met Office is not convinced. They incorporate solar and oceanic cycles into their models, and they say that - even if there are periods of slower warming, or temporary cooling, the long-term trend in global temperatures is still on the up.

SOURCE



Excessive maternity leave and huge sex discrimination payouts 'risk backfiring on women'

Labour's equal rights laws risk harming the prospects of women in the workplace, one of Britain's top businesswomen said last night. Nichola Pease, deputy chairman of JO Hambro capital management and a mother of three, said excessive maternity leave and eye-watering sex discrimination payouts could backfire on women. She denied allegations of sexism in the City, claiming most women did not rise through the ranks because of their own choices rather than any prejudice against them. And she suggested bosses were reluctant to employ women for fear they could go on to have lots of children supported by Britain's over-generous maternity leave system.

'We have got to be realistic and make sure the protection around women doesn't end up backfiring,' she told a parliamentary hearing into sexism in the financial sector. 'That is actually one of my greatest worries.' Mrs Pease, 48, said women were 'a really capable, practical and driven bunch of multi-taskers'. But their contribution to the workforce risked being overshadowed by a nightmare of 'legislation and protection'.

'I think we have got too long maternity she told MPs. 'A year is too long and sex discrimination cases that run into the tens of millions are ridiculous.' Women in Britain currently have the right to 52 weeks maternity leave. But Mrs Pease, who with hedge fund manager husband Crispin Odey is said to be worth £204million, pointed out the U.S. has only 12 weeks maternity leave, while some Far Eastern countries do not have any.

She told MPs that many women did not reach senior levels because they did not want the 'extra responsibility'. And many senior bosses did not have 'confidence' in employing women for fear they would go on to have families at the company's expense. She added: 'How easy is it if they have three children and take five years out?

'I think there is already positive discrimination for women. Call it feminism, but there are a lot of calls for women saying "come on board". 'I think a lot of women that could be on board make choices not to go further up an organisation and they made those choices for a variety of very understandable and acceptable reasons. 'It might be that they have decided to concentrate on their family. 'It may be that they decide they want more flexible working practices and the senior jobs may not be suitable for them. 'It might be that they decide they don't want the responsibility or the extra hours that often go with very, very senior jobs. I think the pyramid structure means that as you go up the pyramid structure there are less senior jobs to choose from.'

Mrs Pease, who is said to earn around £3.5million, enraged equal rights campaigners who warned that maternity leave was vital if women are to compete on equal footing with men. Labour MP Emily Thornberry said: 'I am absolutely horrified to hear such an old-fashioned view expressed by someone who should know better. 'The rights that Labour have given to women are extremely important - especially to women who do not have a £10million cushion to sit on.'

Research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission has pinpointed Britain's financial institutions as bastions of sexism in which women work long hours for less pay and are dominated by a 'macho' culture. Women employed full-time in the City earn 47 per cent less in annual gross salaries than men, compared to a 28 per cent pay gap across the economy, the commission found.

Kat Banyard, from the Fawcett Society - which is campaigning against sexism in the City - said: 'Most women in the workplace cannot afford top pay for someone else to do the caring. 'That is why we need a work place that helps women fulfill their responsibilities and commitments on an equal footing to men. Maternity leave is vital for women. It is a basic fundamental right. 'It is also a fact that women are behind in the boardroom. Just 12 per cent of FTSE company directors are women and progress is glacially slow. 'This is often attributed to to women "opting out", but the question is is why are they facing that choice at all?'

A source close to Harriet Harman said last night: 'Many women still face discrimination against them in pay and opportunities and are underpaid and undervalued at work. We are taking action to tackle this.'

But Ruth Lea, non executive director of the Arbuthnot banking group, said she agreed with Mrs Pease. 'I have long warned that this huge extension of women's rights would backfire,' she said. 'Employers have to be more careful about making a woman redundant... so bosses have to ask themselves whether they take them on in the first place. 'What is so difficult for employers is that women can take up to a year off work and are under no obligation to come back. Meanwhile, they have to keep the job open.'

SOURCE



Britain's Channel 4 to screen documentary that asks whether IQ is linked to race

Channel 4 also aired an "incorrect" programme on climate change. Report below from the mainstream "Daily Mail"

Channel 4 is facing a race controversy after deciding to give a platform to scientists who claim that white people are more intelligent than those who are black. A documentary, fronted by former BBC News correspondent Rageh Omaar, will interview professors who claim brain power is linked to racial grouping. It will include claims that the most intelligent people in the world are North-East Asians from parts of China, Japan and North and South Korea.

The Australian Aborigines will be said to have the lowest average IQ.

The broadcaster has decided to air the comments, which will be abhorrent to many of its viewers, as part of a series of programmes about race and science, aimed at busting 'science's last taboo'. Bosses at the channel claim the season will strongly challenge these opinions and 'explode' the myth that science can support ideas of racial superiority. But the decision to air the issue at all could prove incendiary and is in danger of throwing the channel into another race row. The broadcaster was inundated with complaints in 2007 after it aired the alleged racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother.

To promote the series, Channel 4 has altered photos of Baroness Thatcher, The Beatles, England's 1966 World Cup winning football team and U.S. President Barack Obama to change their racial appearances.

In Race and Intelligence: Science's Last Taboo, Omaar talks to academics who believe that aspects of the human brain are linked to race. He interviews Richard Lynn, emeritus professor at the University of Ulster, who has amassed data which he believes shows there is a global league table of intelligence between the races. He is seen claiming that 'the top rate' are North-East Asians who have an average IQ of 105, followed by North and Central Europeans with a score of 100.

He claims American Indians have an IQ of 87, and that sub-Saharan Africans 'pretty well on either side of the equator' have IQs of around 70. He says Aborigines have the lowest scores of around 65. He says: 'When sub-Saharan Africans come and live - and even several generations of them come to live - in European or North American countries, their IQs increase because of course their environment is improved, their schooling is better and their nutrition is better. 'But their IQs don't rise up to the same level as Europeans.'

British-born J Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, is also interviewed. Professor Rushton claims the differences between black and white and East Asian brains is due to general intelligence. He says black people have smaller-sized brains than white people and are not as intelligent as white people.

In the programme a range of academics line up to criticise the views of the two men. Oona King, Channel 4's head of diversity, said the programme will show conclusively 'that you cannot link race to IQ'. Miss King, a former Labour MP, added: 'Even people who know the race agenda inside out will learn a lot from these programmes.' She called for a 'heated debate' about race, saying: 'This series will change the terms of the debate.'

Dr Watson sparked controversy in 2007 after claiming in a newspaper interview that black people were less intelligent. His views prompted London's Science Museum to scrap a planned talk by him, saying the opinions went 'beyond the point of acceptable debate'. The 79-year-old American geneticist - who does not appear in the show - said he was 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really'. He added that he hoped that everyone was equal, but then alleged that 'people who have to deal with black employees find this not true'. In the interview he claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

Dr Watson was hailed as achieving one of the greatest single scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s, forming part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA. He has been director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, in the U.S., a world leader in research into cancer and genetics, for 50 years.

Dr Watson has been at the heart of several scientific furores over the years. He once reportedly said that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He has suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos. And he also claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: 'People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.'

In his book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, he writes that 'there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. 'Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so'.

Omaar also said in a clip of the show that views society found offensive 'are not defeated by being ignored'.

SOURCE



People 'anxious' when cut off from internet

So the anti-technology brigade will cause suffering if they get their way. They would like that, of course

People are more likely to feel "anxious" when cut off from the internet or their mobile phone than feel "liberated", according to a survey. Staying in a place with no mobile phone coverage, or suffering from the internet going down, is a cause of high stress and anxiety for an increasing number of people, the study suggested.

As many as 85 per cent of full-time mothers always have the internet turned on at home, while a third of people said they no longer felt any sense of guilt about always being "connected" either by having their mobile phone or computer turned on.

The results indicated that 36 per cent of people were anxious about keeping in touch with their family if they were disconnected, compared with 29 per cent who felt they were liberated. When it came to work 29 per cent cent said they were anxious when cut off, compared with 28 per cent saying they felt liberated.

The survey, undertaken for Virgin Media by the analysts Future Laboratory, identified a type of consumer who "switched on to switch off." James Brook, psychologist, said: "These people know that, the modern world waits for no one and that taking a break from technology means potentially missing out.” “At any time we might miss an important email or a phone call, an old friend may try to get in touch via Facebook or breaking news may come in. If they feel that they cannot keep up with these things because they are not connected, it will naturally have a negative impact on their emotional wellbeing and peace of mind.”

Full-time parents arents are the most likely group to be connected with just under half 49 per cent continually having the digital television switched on. They are also the most frequent users of mobile phones.

Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of online parenting network Netmums, said: “Particularly for new mums, you are confined to the house for quite long periods, and it really is a link to the outside world."

SOURCE



Just what Britain needs; Fewer productive workers and more parasites: "Nearly a million jobs in private industry and commerce have been lost in just 15 months, the latest unemployment figures showed yesterday. But the full impact of the recession has been shrugged off in the public sector, which has seen a boom of over 300,000 in recruitment of bureaucrats. There was an increase of 88,000 in the jobless numbers in the three months to August. Ministers hope the figures may signal an improvement in the economy, but the gloss was taken off by the extent to which the Treasury has subsidised employment. But while hundreds of thousands of taxpayer-funded jobs have been created in Whitehall and its branches, town halls and quangos, the private sector has been punished. And pay rises in the public sector are running far ahead of inflation and at nearly three times the rate of wage increases in private business. At the end of June there were more than six million workers in the public sector, up by 304,000 on March 2008 when the recession started to bite. However, over the same 15-month period the number of employees in the private sector dropped by 919,000. And many of the new public sector workers do not appear to have been the 'front-line' staff such as teachers, nurses and policemen of whom ministers like to boast. For example, recent figures showed that the number of teachers has dropped over the past few months, while town halls have continued to hire staff, often to the kind of posts regularly mocked as 'non-jobs'.

Britain is in danger of going bust, warns EU: "Britian's economy was consigned to a list of those at 'high risk' yesterday because of the spiralling national debt. The European Commission issued a humiliating warning that the worsening budget deficit poses 'serious concerns' that the country will be unable to meet future spending commitments, such as pensions. The growing number of elderly people threatens to make debt unsustainable and has led to the UK economy being ranked alongside nations such as Latvia, Greece and Romania. The warning plunged the Government into a furious row with Brussels, as Treasury officials said it called into question the EC's ability to carry out 'credible economic analysis'."





15 October, 2009

The Briffa "hockeystick" was based on a SINGLE TREE!

A full examination of the data chosen by the Warmists themselves shows that we live in an era of exceptional temperature stability. There has been NO global warming over the last 2,000 years -- including the 20th century.

I originally reported Steve McIntyre's demolition of the Briffa "hockeystick" on Sept. 28 but I am still catching up with some details: It seems that Briffa's Russian trees are even more unsatisfactory proof of anything than Michael Mann's Bristlecone pines. Briffa's British "Hockeystick" graph is just as deceitful as Mann's American one.

Instead of the normal statistical practice of disregarding outliers (grossly atypical cases), Keith Briffa built his entire global temperature reconstruction on one! He used just one atypical Russian tree as his basis for describing 2000 years of world climate history! He is a disgrace to science, a disgrace to Britain's Met office and (probably) a disgrace to Malta. Anthony Watts has read Briffa's lame reply to Steve McIntyre and rebuts it as follows:

1. Plotting the entire Hantemirov and Shiyatov data set, as I’ve done here, shows it to be almost flat not only in the late 20th century, but through much of its period.



(Larger graph here)

How do you explain why your small set of 10 trees shows a late 20th century spike while the majority of Hantemirov and Shiyatov data does not? You write in your rebuttal: “He offers no justification for excluding the original data; and in one version of the chronology where he retains them, he appears to give them inappropriate low weights.”

Justify your own method of selecting 10 trees out of a much larger data set. You’ve failed to do that. That’s the million dollar question.

Briffa Writes: “My application of the Regional Curve Standardisation method to these same data was intended to better represent the multi-decadal to centennial growth variations necessary to infer the longer-term variability in average summer temperatures in the Yamal region: to provide a direct comparison with the chronology produced by Hantemirov and Shiyatov.“

OK Fair enough, but why not do it for the entire data set, why only a small subset?

2. It appears that your results are heavily influenced by a single tree, as Steve McIntyre has just demonstrated here.



10 CRU trees ending in 1990. Age-adjusted index

As McIntyre points out: “YAD061 reaches 8 sigma and is the most influential tree in the world.”

Seems like an outlier to me when you have one tree that can skew the entire climate record. Explain yourself on why you failed to catch this.

3. Why the hell did you wait 10 years to release the data? You did yourself no favors by deferring reasonable requests to archive data to enable replication. It was only when you became backed into a corner by The Royal Society that you made the data available. Your delays and roadblocks (such as providing an antique data format of the punched card era), plus refusing to provide metadata says more about your integrity than the data itself. Your actions make it appear that you did not want to release the data at all. Your actions are not consistent with the actions of the vast majority of scientists worldwide when asked for data for replication purposes. Making data available on paper publication for replication is the basis of proper science, which is why The Royal Society called you to task.

Yet while it takes years to produce your data despite repeated requests, you can mount a response to Steve McIntyre’s findings on that data in a couple of days, through illness even.

Do I believe Dr. Keith Briffa? No.

SOURCE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)

Below is the "unmassaged" temperature record as seen in Russian tree rings (From here). It is as flat as a tack. Yet Briffa published many papers in learned journals over the years claiming the contrary.

He has dragged the Hadley Centre's name through the mud. Will Hadley fire him? We will see. They are all in pretty deep there. The journals that have published Briffa's papers should certainly withdraw them if they have any respect for their own good name. It is a rarity for a journal to withdraw an article. It is normally done only where there is a case of complete fraud. This is such an case.



I reproduce the graph above simply to show Briffa's dishonesty. Using tree rings to represent temperature is very dubious. Temperature is only one influence on tree rings. Actual thermometer data does however go back 350 years in central England and it shows the 20th century average temperature to be a touch COOLER than the pre-industrial 18th century. So, on that much firmer basis, human industrial activity has had NO effect on temperature.

For all we know, however, central England may be as atypical as Briffa's tree. It is claims that "the debate is over" that are the absurdity. It was never true and there is now no trace of truth in it. We may in fact NEVER have a precise reconstruction of past global temperatures. And even the concept of a global temperature may not make much sense, considering that one place on the globe may be unusually warm while another is unusually cool.

Given that onomastics has long been a hobby of mine (No. Onomastics has nothing to do with the sin of Onan) I would be interested to hear if anyone knows the meaning of the surname Briffa. It is a Maltese name as far as I know so if you know any Maltese, ask them.





Baby left severely brain-damaged by negligent hospital in socialist Britain

Arun Rees was born with severe brain damage after hospital staff waited 90 minutes to deliver him, starving his brain of oxygen. The medics failed to spot he was suffering complications in the womb, with one doctor even recommending that his mother simply needed to go the toilet.

Miss Rees’s pregnancy had already been judged high risk because she was 44 and had previously suffered a miscarriage. She was admitted to the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff at 32 weeks suffering from abdominal pains but says she was not properly treated for more than two hours even though heart monitor readings ‘clearly showed’ the baby was in distress. She said: ‘I just couldn’t understand why they weren’t doing anything to help me and my baby. ‘At my last antenatal visit I was told my baby was breech and I would need a Caesarean section. It was a no-brainer – I knew my baby needed to be delivered urgently. I was screaming in agony and begging the midwives to get my baby out but they just left me. ‘I couldn’t believe it when a doctor arrived and said I wasn’t ready to deliver but had probably eaten something that had disagreed with me and to try going to the toilet instead.’

Eventually an emergency Caesarean was performed an hour and a half later on a second doctor’s recommendation. Arun was taken to the special baby care unit after he was delivered but had suffered irreversible brain damage. Miss Rees and Mr Govekar switched off his life support machine after ten days.

The couple who own a restaurant in Penarth, South Wales, said their lives had been completely devastated by the death of their son. Miss Rees, now 48, said: ‘After the upset of an earlier miscarriage, we were both thrilled when I became pregnant again. It was all we wanted and it was taken away from us.’ She added: ‘As far as I am concerned the hospital has robbed me of a family. I am 48 now, I will probably never have a family.’

The couple spoke yesterday after winning a four-year battle for an apology from the hospital along with £160,000 in compensation. Mr Govekar, also 48, said: ‘The last four years have been a relentless battle to gain answers. Arun’s death has taken its toll on us both. ‘It has affected our health, our ability to work and at times it threatened to break up our relationship completely. ‘We can only hope that we can now move forward with our lives.’

Their solicitor Guy Forster added: ‘Although baby Arun was premature he was well developed and experts have confirmed that in all likelihood he would have survived had the staff taken appropriate action.’ He continued: ‘For Johanne and Krishna, this case has never been about the money but about ensuring that lessons have been learned, as they do not want any other couple to go through the tragedy they have experienced.’

Katie Norton, director of primary services for the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, said: ‘This was an exceptional and difficult case and we have worked with the staff to learn lessons. ‘I want to apologise again unreservedly on behalf of Cardiff and Vale University Health Board for the distress that Ms Rees and Mr Govekar have experienced and offer our sincere condolences to them.’

SOURCE



Geert Wilders wins appeal against exclusion from UK

Britain's Leftist government allows some of the scum of the earth to stay in Britain but tried to keep out an influential Dutch politician -- on the grounds that his presence would "inflame" Muslims. A government that was really committed to community harmony would have adopted measures to deal with the inflamed ones, not added to the attack on their target

Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch politician, today won his appeal against the government's decision not to allow him into the UK. Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, was originally refused entry in February after arriving in London. He had been due to show his 17-minute film Fitna, which criticises the Qu'ran as a "fascist book", at the House of Lords, but was turned away at Heathrow airport.

The decision to refuse Wilders entry to the country, made by Jacqui Smith, then the home secretary, led to criticism of what was seen by some commentators as the silencing of free speech. The ruling by the asylum and immigration tribunal means that Wilders, who is accused of Islamophobia, could now be allowed into the country.

In initially refusing Wilders access, a letter sent to the politician by the Home Office, on behalf of Jacqui Smith, said his presence "would pose a genuine, present and significantly serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The secretary of state is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in the film and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public safety in the UK."

Today a Home Office spokesman said the government was "disappointed" by the ruling. He said: "The government opposes extremism is all its forms. The decision to refuse Wilders admission was taken on the basis that his presence could have inflamed tensions between our communities and have led to inter-faith violence. We still maintain this view."

SOURCE



Bureaucratic oppression called off: British childcare ban scrapped

Rules effectively banning parents from looking after friends’ children will be scrapped after a public outcry, the Government has announced. Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, said childcare arrangements between friends should “not be a matter for regulation”. The move comes weeks after two police officers who looked after each other’s daughters were ordered to stop because they broke the law.

Detective Constable Leanne Shepherd and DC Lucy Jarrett shared a job with Thames Valley Police and took it in turns to babysit. But under rules introduced last year, adults must register with Ofsted if they look after children for more than two hours on any one day.

Under guidelines, they must complete a criminal record check, learn first aid, take a childcare course and even follow Labour’s “nappy curriculum” for under-fives. More than 20,000 people have so far signed a petition objecting to the rules.

Now Mr Balls has written to Christine Gilbert, the head of Ofsted, ordering her to make clear that the law should not interfere with arrangements between parents. “When parents make their own reciprocal childcare arrangements with friends they retain full responsibility for the care their children receive, and I am clear that this should not be a matter for regulation,” he said.

The rules – adopted following the Childcare Act 2006 – set out that adults should register as official childminders if they look after under-16s for “reward”. Ofsted said reward applied to cash payments and giving parents time to work.

But Mr Balls suggested this was the wrong interpretation of the legislation. “It has never been our intention to intervene in these kinds of arrangements between parents and friends, and I believe that had this issue been debated when the [legislation] was passing through Parliament there would have been widespread agreement about this,” he said.

The regulations will still apply to parents who pay friends to look after childre

SOURCE



Supermarket boss criticises UK education system

The chief executive of Tesco, the nation’s largest private employer, has criticised educational standards for failing to prepare teenagers for the workplace. Sir Terry Leahy said that standards in schools were often “woefully low” and that the education system left it to private companies to “pick up the pieces”. He said that teachers were hindered from doing their jobs by red tape and criticised the system’s “back office” bureaucracy.

Tesco is unhappy that it spends time training recruits in basic numeracy and “communications” skills, which includes writing, because workers are ill-equipped when they leave school. Sir Terry’s forthright comments to a food industry conference were echoed by Asda, Britain’s second biggest supermarket chain.

An Asda executive told the event that low educational standards had led to a state of affairs where parents in deprived areas were choosing to spend money on alcohol rather than on nappies for their children.

Sir Terry told the audience of food manufacturers and retailers: “We depend on high standards in our schools, as today’s schoolchildren are tomorrow’s team; they will be the ones we need to help build our business. “Sadly, despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us, and I suspect many of you, are often left to pick up the pieces.”

He added: “From my perspective there are too many agencies and bodies, often issuing reams of instructions to teachers, who then get distracted from the task at hand: teaching children. “I am not saying that retail is like education, merely that my experience tells me that when it comes to the number of people you have in the back office, less is more.”

Sir Terry’s criticism is potentially embarrassing for Gordon Brown, as the Tesco chief is a member of the Prime Minister’s Business Council for Britain. A spokesman for Tesco said that the comments were not political.

Tesco employs 280,000 staff, more than 40,000 of whom are aged under 19. It has 900 apprentices.

The Confederation of British Industry said that Sir Terry’s views were shared by many of its members. Andy Clarke, Asda’s chief operating officer, told the IGD conference that the growing number of 18 to 24-year-olds who were not in education or employment was leading to a vicious circle of low educational attainment and high unemployment in deprived areas. He said: “No one can deny that Britain has spawned a generation of young people who struggle to read, write or do simple maths. That’s why we’re finding packs of nappies discarded in the booze aisle, as the last few pounds are spent on alcohol rather than childcare.”

Tesco’s intervention comes as two other leading business figures claim that British qualifications leave school-leavers less “marketable” than their European counterparts. Sir Mike Rake, chairman of BT Group, and Sir Christopher Gent, chairman of GlaxoSmithKline, said that A levels had been devalued by grade inflation. Sir Christopher said: “Increasingly, people in the biggest companies are internationally mobile, and having an academic framework that is consistent around the world is quite appealing. Grade inflation has devalued the A-level and it is now an OK exam that used to be an excellent one.”

A spokesman for the Department for Children, School and Families said: “Standards have never been higher in our secondary schools. We are working to lift the burden of administration tasks from teachers.” Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, denied last night that Sir Terry’s comments were part of a wider Tory-inspired plan.

SOURCE



Greenie garbage tyranny in Britain

£1,000 fine for putting any food scraps in the dustbin as 'zero waste' policy could lead up to five-bin headache

Householders could be fined £1,000 if they throw food scraps and potato peelings into the dustbin under a Government 'zero waste' policy. They will be forced to sift through their rubbish for anything that can be recycled, reused, rotted or burnt for electricity. The crackdown will create so much recyclable material that homes could be given five wheelie bins and waste boxes to cope.

The controversial zero waste policy - part of the Government's drive to cut greenhouse gas emissions - will be unveiled tomorrow by Environment Minister Hilary Benn. The plans are due to be outlined at a 'waste summit' aimed at finding new ways to halve the 62million tons of rubbish sent to landfill each year. Ministers will discuss the issue with councils, businesses and waste experts.

Yesterday, Mr Benn said the Government would launch a consultation early next year into banning food, cans, paper and glass from landfill. Homes that persistently break the rules by putting food waste in the ordinary dustbin could face fines of £1,000 or more. 'One that we are going to consult on around the turn of the year is banning certain things from going into landfill,' he told the Politics Show on BBC1. 'Because does it make sense to put food into landfill? No it doesn't.' By 2020, all councils will be forced to offer a full recycling service, he said.

But the plans were condemned by critics. Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers' Alliance pressure group, said: 'Voters are sceptical about recycling policy - particularly when they see recyclables being thrown on the same bins as landfill waste. 'The Government should sort out the current recycling policy before starting on new barmy ideas. 'The fact that food waste could be banned from landfill - eff