Eye on Britain

2009-07-15T00:04:00.001+11:30

British antisemites go to jail

They would have been protected by the 1st Amendment in the USA. The BBC story below covers up the shallow grounds for the prosecution but I myself saw a lot of their material at the time it went up and it certainly denied the holocaust in no uncertain terms and was certainly extremely derogatory but it did not call for attacks on Jews. I saw no incitement to violence and none is quoted in the article below. What they said was very similar to what Muslims routinely say, except that Muslims DO sometimes incite to violence. They were convicted because they were white working class and because what they said was abusive and insulting, nothing else. White working class non-Muslims are entitled "to hold racist and extreme views" in Britain only if they tell nobody about it, apparently. It is a sad day for free speech and justice in biased Britain.

"Jurors at Leeds Crown Court decided neo-Nazis Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle were not just harmless oddballs, but dangerous propagandists dedicated to whipping up racism. On Friday, Sheppard was jailed for four years, 10 months and Whittle for two years, four months.

In a landmark case, they have become the first Britons to be convicted of inciting racial hatred via a foreign website, having printed leaflets and controlled websites in the US featuring racist material.

The court heard the investigation into the pair began when a complaint about an anti-Semitic comic book called Tales of the Holohoax was made to the police in 2004 after it was pushed through the door of a synagogue in Blackpool, Lancashire.

It was traced back to a post office box in Hull registered to Sheppard, 51, a former BNP organiser kicked out of the far-right party after he was jailed in 2000 for distributing a racially inflammatory election leaflet.

Although their vitriol was variously directed at black, Asian and other non-white people, most of the material shown to the jury was virulently anti-Semitic. The language and racial slurs used by the pair cannot be repeated here, but some of the excerpts presented to the court offered a flavour of their discourse.

Jonathan Sandiford, prosecuting, told the jury that it held up survivors of the Holocaust to "ridicule and contempt", accusing them of lying about the genocide of six million Jews. Another story was illustrated with photographs of dead Jews. Sheppard also wrote that Holocaust victim Anne Frank's diary was "evil".

Reviewing lawyer Mari Reid, of the Crown Prosecution Service's counter-terrorism division, said members of the public were entitled under the law to hold racist and extreme views. But she added: "What they are not entitled to do is to publish or distribute those opinions to the public in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner either intending to stir up racial hatred or in circumstances where it is likely racial hatred will be stirred up."

Source

Note that the case does NOT indicate rejection of antisemitism in Britain. Antisemitism is in fact rife among the British intelligentsia (See here and here) but they express it so much more nicely in those circles. Had the men referred to above been upper middle class and used a more educated vocabulary and accent, their views could have been expressed at most good dinner parties and been regarded as a little extreme but understandable. And that antisemitism is now beginning to show officially. Britain has just blocked the export of gun parts to Israel

Note again that British police are "advised to turn a blind eye on crimes such as incitement to religious hatred" when Muslims do it. No equality before the law in Leftist Britain. It's not what you say but who says it that counts.

British government forcing up the costs of private schooling

Hundreds of independent schools could lose their charitable status unless they increase fees for middle-class parents to fund more bursaries, a landmark ruling indicates today. Two of the first five schools to be investigated by the Charity Commission have failed the tough new requirement of providing “public benefit”. The long-awaited decision has ramifications for fee-charging schools with charitable status, which make up the majority of the independent sector. The tax breaks that they receive are worth a collective £100 million.

The independent sector reacted with anger and said it could take legal action against the commission. It said that parents, already struggling in the recession, were likely to end up paying higher school fees to subsidise poorer families. The commission had focused on the financial benefits, it said, while placing little weight on whether less wealthy schools shared their facilities with the community or had forged links with state schools.

The two schools that did not pass the charitable test are relatively small prep schools. Both failed because they did not offer enough bursaries, even though they were praised for running initiatives which helped local children and organisations. One, Highfield Priory School in Fulwood, Lancashire, does not provide bursaries because it keeps fees as low as possible, and does not accrue a surplus. The other, Saint Anselm’s School in Bakewell, Derbyshire, does offer bursaries worth up to 100 per cent of fees to poorer families, but the number was not deemed sufficient by the commission.

Simon Northcott, the head teacher, said: “As a stand-alone prep school, we just don’t have the pot that other schools have. We failed only because we’re not producing enough bursaries. But nowhere in the course of this process has the commission given us a clear idea of what we need to achieve. “It’s like being told you’ve failed a maths exam but without being told what the passmark is.”

A spokesman for Highfield Priory said: “The governors of Highfield Priory are disappointed at the Charity Commission’s conclusion on public benefit. However, the continued success and sustainability of the school is not in doubt. Highfield Priory has served the local community well for nearly 70 years and our aim remains to continue to provide a high-quality education for public benefit, affording pupils many opportunities to succeed academically, creatively, artistically, musically and in a wide range of sports both at local and regional level. “The governors will now consider fully the implications of the Charity Commission report and respond to it after taking professional advice.”

The 2006 Charities Act puts a new onus on charities to prove their public benefit, and the commission has assessed a dozen organisations, including the five schools. Independent schools have been waiting with trepidation for clarification on what constitutes “public benefit”, and were assured that schools would be judged individually.

David Lyscom, head of the Independent Schools Council, said that he was deeply disappointed by the commission’s findings and its focus on the amount of means-tested bursaries provided by each school. He said: “The implication of the commission’s findings appears to be that many schools must now aim to provide a significant — but still unspecified — proportion of their turnover in full bursaries. “This will inevitably lead to fee increases for the vast majority of parents, putting the benefits of an independent education beyond the reach of a greater number of children. “We will be expressing our concerns very loudly and will have to look very carefully at the legal basis of the Charity Commission judgments, and consider whether we need to take further action.” When asked if this could include legal action, Mr Lyscom said: “It is one of a range of options we could take.”

He added that, in focusing on bursaries, the commission had played down the significance of partnerships with state schools and ignored the £3 billion a year that the independent sector saved the public purse in educating children.

Schools which were concerned that they would be judged purely on the money spent on bursaries have been assured that this will not be the case. Dame Suzi Leather, chairwoman of the commission, had previously acknowledged that bursaries may not be an option for some smaller schools. However, the findings are likely to send shivers through low-cost schools that operate near the margins and may be struggling. The recession has already taken its toll on the independent sector, with several small independent schools closing or merging in the past year. The governors of Highfield and Saitn Anselm’s have three months to confirm their intention to address the issues raised by the commission, and a further nine months to provide a plan of how this will happen.

A spokesman for the commission said: “It is not correct to state that the Charity Commission’s initial public benefit assessments of charitable independent schools focused only on the provision of means-tested bursaries. “We have been very clear throughout this process that, although fee reductions are an obvious way of making the services of a fee-charging charity more widely accessible, that is not the only means of achieving this.”

SOURCE

Why Britain should fear American health care reform

Tucked away in a piece about possible end runs around NICE, the health care rationing body, is something of a scary paragraph:

Pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to launch new drugs in the UK at low cost because 25% of the global market is influenced by the UK price.

No, not that one sentence, although it helps explain why this next one is scary:

It comes at a time when other countries are actively considering setting up equivalents to Nice. First among them, and most important for the pharmaceutical industry, is the US. President Obama is known to be interested in some sort of cost-effectiveness scrutiny of medicines, which is bitterly opposed by the industry.

What all too few seem to understand is that medical innovation is hugely driven by what happens in the US market. The only market that is largely free from price controls. We can see from the first sentence that price controls do indeed retard innovation but of course there is no outcry about this for we don't normally see it. Who does take note of cures that aren't invented, aren't launched, because price controls mean there is no profit in their being so?

The great release from this problem for European health care systems has been that the US market, by far the largest in the world, is not subject to such price controls. Thus 300 million of the richest people on the planet underwrite, through the prices they pay for new treatments, the developments that we get years later as prices drop.

If the US does indeed bring in some form of NICE equivalent, some form of price rationing, then medical innovation will fall....no, not cease completely, simply there will be less of it than there would otherwise have been. Thus people who could or might have been cured will not be and they will die.

Reform of the US system might still be worthwhile, something like NICE might even still make sense: but don't anyone believe that such changes will be costless, they will indeed cost lives.

SOURCE

NHS 'obsession with breastfeeding is putting bottle-fed babies at risk'

Thousands of mothers who bottle feed are accidentally putting their babies' health at risk, says a study. They were found to be using too much formula milk powder and timing feeds wrongly. Frequent overfeeding can put babies at risk of long-term obesity and conditions associated with it, such as heart disease.

The problem is blamed on the Health Service's obsession with breastfeeding. It is accused of failing to provide enough information to new mothers on the alternatives. Cambridge University experts reviewed studies involving more than 13,000 mothers. They found that many mothers felt guilty or thought they were a failure for bottle feeding, while many were angry about not being able to breastfeed.

Others thought midwives were more interested in helping breastfeeding mothers than those who used bottles. Ministers are keen to get more mothers to breastfeed because of mounting evidence that it improves children's immunity to disease and helps brain development. It is also thought to reduce a mother's chance of heart attack.

The research, published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood journal, involved 23 studies. The authors found that some NHS midwives mistakenly thought they were forbidden from giving advice to bottle-feeding mothers, even after the baby was born. 'When women do not get information from healthcare professionals, they are reliant on friends and family, and incorrect practices are likely to be handed down from one generation to the next,' the researchers said.

They found that many mothers mistakenly put too much formula powder with the water. 'In addition to the short-term issues of hygiene and safety, it is possible that errors in the measurement and over concentration of bottle feeds may contribute to overfeeding, rapid infancy weight gain and later obesity,' they said.

The World Health Organisation code on infant feeding says only limited information on bottle feeding should be given before the baby is born - and after birth, instruction on bottle feeding should be given only after the mother has decided against breastfeeding. The study also noted that parents often changed the brand of formula they used if their baby was regurgitating it, in the belief the child might have a food intolerance. However 'it was possible that the reason for this symptom may not have been intolerance but overfeeding', the researchers said. 'There was a risk that infants would wrongly be labelled as having an intrinsic abnormality with longterm consequences to their health.'

An Infant Feeding Survey from 2005 showed that while 78 per cent of mothers in England initiate breastfeeding, only 45 per cent of babies were exclusively breastfed aged one week, dropping to less than 1 per cent when they were six months. The authors said that while it was known that breast milk is best for baby, mothers who choose to bottle-feed or who have failed with breastfeeding should be supported. They added: 'Inadequate information and support for mothers who decide to bottle feed may put the health of their babies at risk.'

SOURCE

Creeping Fascism

Below is an excerpt from an article in a Scottish Leftist magazine which points out large similarities between historic Fascism and society today. I have also written to that effect

It is the subtle aspects of Fascist ideology that remain standing and develop their forms and continue their onward march despite all the military defeats suffered by Fascism’s historic regimes.

The corporate monopolisation of markets is the symptom and outcome of this onward march, but not the cause, which is the monopolisation of public reason. For Benito Mussolini this depended on stealthily “plucking the chicken one feather at a time.”2 His preferred name for the system was corporativism and a fuller understanding of this so-called ‘friendly Fascism’ and its pre-history provides a vital means to oppose the whole Fascist phenomenon.

Fascism ought to be understood as an ideologically sophisticated and creeping set of political relations that undermine free contest and the full expression of different material and class interests within society at large. From this perspective, the general geopolitical failure of Fascism only marks the end of various formally authoritarian States and certainly not the end of authoritarian State politics at a number of levels. Fascism’s more subtle progress is the true ‘clear and present danger’ to the development of democratic society or to whatever integrity democracy might still possess. The danger arises partly because one of the historical preconditions of Fascism, as theorised by Mussolini, has now been achieved thanks to the adventurism of the U.S. empire. The war on terror has given us the state of permanent, unbounded war originally dreamt up by the Italian dictator to bring about a specific economic and ideological order at home and military expansionism abroad.

That the Italian Republic, supposedly founded on the defeat of Fascism, has re-embraced the ideology under the guise of “Post-Fascism” within a parliamentary democracy is alarming. But, perhaps more alarming is that elsewhere, with no mention of any sort of Fascism, we also see the triangulation of policy towards “single purpose government”, as it is now called in Scotland. This widespread and neo-totalitarian sense of purpose favours corporations by gearing all policies towards existing markets or their creation where they do not already exist. In return, States are blessed with various stamps of approval from big business and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Despite their reputation for imposing deadly market orthodoxies across the world, the power of these controversial institutions appears to be unassailable.3 These developments are connected to the progress of Fascist ideas and opposition to them is a matter of great urgency.

Mussolini envisioned the corporative nation in biological terms as a body of non-competing and co-operative functions. In 1934, Fascists from different European countries agreed that this was the defining element of their international movement. As Francis Mulhern notes in ‘Culture/Metaculture’, the functions of corporativism, or corporatism as it is now known, are all imagined to make “their necessary, mutually non-exchangeable contributions to the health of the whole. It is accordingly anti-individualist in temper (the notion of competition between parts of the body is absurd) and also anti-socialist (the notion of a struggle between the hands and the head is equally absurd – as are democracy and equality).”4 While this mythic idea of the nation as the body coincided with the racial policies pursued by the Nazis, the bodily doctrine cannot be reduced to its most murderous convulsions. In Nazi Germany, Gleichschaltung also aimed for the co-ordination of the life of the nation and it is the deep-seated ideology of enforced co-operation and managed national solidarity which provided the underlying logic of Fascism.

Although independent trade unions were politically disabled and outlawed in Italy, top-down organised labour and welfare policies were reborn in the image of Fascist corporatism, which, if nothing else, adhered to the aristocratic ideal of noblesse oblige. According to Gaetano Salvemini, an exile from the Italian system and one of its most sensitive critics, the impact of this policy to disorganise and manipulate the autonomy of labour was to effectively nationalise it, making labour into the State’s bargaining chip in its dealings with capitalists. Imagine being threatened by your boss for using the word “ballot” in communicating with fellow trade unionists because that word alone was an incitement to industrial action. Sadly this is not an example of legalised bullying under 1930s Fascism but the experience of a member of the Public and Commercial Services Union in Britain today. One only has to think for a few moments about nation-States with their normalised anti-labour laws and activities and see these policies in the context of international capitalism to begin to see the triangular outlines of the renewed repression.

In Fascist Italy of the 1930s, public institutions called corporations were to support co-operation and consultation between different interest groups, between labour and capital and between various economic sectors. In reality they were unrepresentative talking shops, the real function of which was to dignify a range of coercive policies. Followers of the Marxist, Antonio Gramsci would call this passive revolution, whereby “in lieu of attaining support for what it is doing, a government instead decides to act as if it alone were the origin of social change.”5 Yet the rhetorical element of co-operation and consultation remained central to Fascist practice. So attractive was the ideal of corporatist State to its proponents that they wrote admiringly of its company-like functions before the public corporations were even brought into dubious existence. Perhaps the reality is best summed up by Salvemini in his 1936 book ‘Under the Axe of Fascism’. For Salvemini, to find real co-operation and genuine consultation taking place through corporatist institutions was like “looking in a dark room for a black cat which is not there.”6

With this history in mind the obvious question for trades unions and other pressure groups in civil society today is how far has advanced capitalism adapted itself to the same logic of disempowered, disabled yet highly symbolic communication? There is a growing body of research on international development which suggests that the outcomes of participatory processes and public deliberation about policy are in fact preordained by the wisdom of the international financial institutions such as the World Bank.7 It should be asked, therefore, how far do citizens become institutionally formed and incorporated by processes that allow us the pleasure of expressing our views, and sometimes taking action, but only in return for the finally demoralising experience of being overcome by the carefully structured imbalance of actual power?

But if such a bleak perspective is valid, it is too easy to lay the blame on big business or some overly abstract notion of “the system” when corporatism is a particular rot that can set in almost anywhere. It can be seen in the paternalistic ethos of politicians, and in the dealings of “sweetheart” trade unions that function more like an arm of management, or in any number of individuals and ad hoc groups that grasp opportunities to represent or to lead the course of policy without examining the issue of meaningful democratic accountability.8 However compelling one may find Naomi Klein’s account of the ‘Shock Doctrine’9, shock tactics are not necessarily required to ignite the slow burning processes of corporatism. Trying to address these difficult issues here leads gradually towards a key distinction between freedoms of expression, on the one hand, and how the terms of communication may or may not be defined by the public interest, on the other. We live in an era that rather robotically celebrates individuals: individuals as spokespeople for the ‘voiceless’; inspired, creative and visionary individuals; individuals as over-achievers, enlightened benefactors, and celebrity of all kinds. But has an actual individualism, of the kind that historians and sociologists have found at the heart of Bourgeois revolutions against feudalism, been subtly replaced by mere persona in consumerist society? Are the beneficiaries and descendents of social and political flux in the 1960s now at one with an entrepreneurial ideology which downplays the new ‘feudalism’ perpetrated by a remarkably like-minded corporate power elite?

For anyone who has been subjected to mind-numbing processes of fake consultation – in the workplace or in civic deliberation on matters like housing, health, urban planning or culture – Salvemini’s metaphor of the darkened empty room minus cat has a certain poetic resonance in relation to the way the appearance of consensus is constructed in a political and ideological vacuum. Often, this is done with the aid of key unelected personnel who, we are endlessly told, have expertise although they often appear to have descended upon us from another lifeworld where everyone gets along and power goes unquestioned. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to immediately draw a line from the original Fascist ideology of co-operation to the dispiriting operations of technocrats and today’s neo-corporatism. Moreover, the Fascist-spawned British National Party knows only too well how to exploit the void opened up by the legitimate and widespread public contempt for what passes for democratic process in Britain. The response from mainstream parties has been to co-ordinate their campaigning to exclude the BNP. If taken in good faith, this response from mainstream politicians, would be more convincing if they were able to demonstrate a genuine commitment to unfettered public reasoning.

Undoubtedly, public discussion has been substantially dumbed down by the adherence to neoliberal ideology by all the main parties and their favourite ‘opinion-formers’. The truth is that far-right populists have arguments that cannot be properly answered without raising the ghost of anti-capitalist counter arguments which, however unpopular they have become in consumer societies, remain extremely relevant. In the face of the ongoing financial crisis, witness the media silence about the continent-wide reforms to the financial system underway in Latin America.

Part of the problem of restricting public discussion along narrow ideological lines is the way that primitive xenophobia gets branded as Fascist and racist, sometimes as if those were quite simply one and the same. We should remember that Italian Fascism became officially racist, it did not start out that way. Moreover, Fascist identity politics were not quite as exclusivist as often painted. In keeping with the history of liberal imperialism they were, and remain, all about reinforcing a variegated, and historically variable, racial pecking-order.

More blindly xenophobic voices today are rather too hastily ostracised for their proto-Fascist tendencies when the crucial Fascist lineage is far more likely to be the ongoing development of coercive rationalism, certainly not confined to matters of ‘race’. Paradoxically, when brought to public discourse it is this branch of rationalism that would coercively exclude the BNP. And in doing so it implicitly reduces Fascism to its most primitive party-political manifestation and therefore misrepresents or ignores its true philosophical scope. It is also this branch of rationalism that can be seen adapting centrist politics to totalitarian-like policies such as torture, the derogation of key laws, support for undue or unaccountable police powers, and the attack on civil liberties in general. If all this is not enough to demand that we take the philosophical basis of coercive rationalism seriously, then polling evidence, suggesting that a majority of Britons agree with far-right policies when they are not known to be those of the BNP, should make us pause for thought.11

The coercive branch of rationalism celebrates the power of the mind and self-will. It neglects the social and historic complexity of the development of modern societies along with the most troubling aspects of everyday life in them. This ideological vanishing trick draws us back to the key philosophical split of the European Enlightenment: “on the one hand [there is] the Enlightenment’s association of progress with autonomous and critical self-reflection within a society based on the principles of equality, liberty and the participation of independent and rational individuals, and on the other, the identification of progress with the development of scientific/technical reason and the subordination of society to the requirements of this process.”12 This is no abstract philosophical matter. As Val Plumwood argues in her book, Environmental Culture, “reason has been captured by power and made an instrument of oppression, it must be remade as a tool for liberation.”

More HERE

Episcopal bishop wants to have her cake and eat it too

You would never guess from her words that HER Bible-scorning church is the driving force behind the developing schism

The presiding bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church warned the Church of England not to foment schism in America, responding to a threat made over the possibility that the U.S. church will start ordaining actively gay bishops.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said Sunday, in response to questions from The Washington Times, that calls by conservatives in the Church of England for recognition of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) over gay-related issues would wound her church, already split by the secession of conservative dioceses and congregations to form the ACNA.

She urged Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to remember the "pain of many Episcopalians in several places of being shut out of their traditional worship spaces, and the broken relationships, the damaged relationships between people who have gone and people who have stayed." "Recognition of something like ACNA is unfortunately likely only to encourage" further secessions, she said, reminding the Church of England that "schism is not a Christian act."

Bishop Jefferts Schori's remarks come amid a fight at the triennial meeting of the General Convention, the Episcopal Church's top legislative body, which began moves over the weekend to overturn the church's 2006 ban on gay bishops. On Saturday night, the church's World Missions Committee consolidated 13 resolutions into a single bill that opens the door for gays "like any other baptized members, to any ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church."

The General Convention has a bicameral structure - divided into a House of Deputies and a House of Bishops - and resolutions require approval by both houses. The committee vote, however, was divided, with the panel's deputies - the clergy and lay members of the General Convention - voting 24-2 in favor of the bill, while the panel's bishops voted 3-2 to reject it.

The Rev. Charlie Holt, a conservative deputy from the Diocese of Central Florida, predicted the deputies would endorse the committee report, noting the numbers were not there to hold the ban. Passing the other hurdle may prove harder. Washington Bishop John B. Chane, though a longtime supporter of pro-gay causes in the church, told The Times on Sunday that rescinding the ban "will not be helpful," adding that he did not think the "effort to overturn it will be successful." Bishop Chane said he hoped the Convention would be "respectful of our differences, and that we don't leave" with the degree of rancor the church experienced in 2006 when the ban was enacted.

But pressure to block the bill has come from the church's overseas partners. On Thursday, Archbishop Williams urged the Convention not to rescind the ban, saying "I hope and pray that there won't be decisions in the coming days that could push us further apart." Archbishop Williams declined to tell the Episcopal Church what the consequences might be if it repudiated the gay ban. But other leaders of the Church of England indicated that possible consequences would be a break with the Episcopal Church or the recognition of its rival, the ACNA.

On Friday, Bishop N.T. Wright of Durham told members of the Church of England's General Synod that their House of Bishops' Theological Committee would study the organizing documents of the ACNA. A resolution has also been proposed for debate in the next session of synod that would recognize the ACNA.

SOURCE

Britain penalizes Israel for retaliating against incessant Arab attacks

The British antisemitism genie is half out of the bottle now

In a move that threatens to strain diplomatic ties, Britain has blocked the sale of spare parts for Israel’s fleet of missile gunships because they were used in the recent campaign in Gaza.

The first country to revoke an arms licence in response to the war in Gaza six months ago, Britain told the Israeli Embassy in London that five of the export requests for parts for the Sa’ar 4.5 gunships had been rejected because the vessels had fired on Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s controversial 23-day campaign against the militant group Hamas. The spare parts were intended for the ships’ guns.

An Israeli defence official said that Britain’s decision to revoke five of the 182 licences reviewed by the Government would not impair the navy’s operational abilities — but admitted that there was concern within the military that other countries might follow suit.

Officials in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office said the British ban was a “dangerous step for Israeli diplomatic relations”.

More HERE

A wonderful and instructive heart transplant story

A BRITISH girl who had a donor heart grafted onto her own after suffering cardiac failure as a baby has had the transplant removed and is living a healthy life with her own heart. The case of Hannah Clark is thought to be the only one in the world where a child's failing heart recovered enough for the donor organ to be removed, the British surgeons told reporters ahead of their report in The Lancet journal.

"The possibility of recovery of the heart is just like magic,'' Professor Magdi Yacoub of Imperial College London, said. Prof Yacoub treated Hannah from the beginning and co-authored the journal paper.

Hannah, now 16, suffered as a baby from severe heart failure due to cardiomyopathy, a problem with the muscle of the heart, and in July 1995, when she was two years old, doctors transplanted a donor heart next to hers. The new organ soon took over much of the functioning of her own heart and Hannah began to recover.

However, she suffered from a type of cancer known as EBV PTLD, a common side-effect of the drugs given to transplant patients to stop their immune systems rejecting new organs. She was treated with chemotherapy and other drugs but the cancer kept returning. Doctors reduced her dosage of immunosuppression drugs to stem the disease, but as a result, her transplanted heart began to fail. In contrast however, her own heart recovered and began functioning normally.

In February 2006, the team decided to remove the donor organ so the immunosuppression could be stopped - something that had never been done before. Just over three years later, Hannah has completely recovered from the cancer and her heart is functioning normally.

Prof Yacoub and the team responsible for her remarkable treatment said her case offered vital clues to the study of transplantation, heart recovery and malignant disease. The report's co-author Victor Tsang said the research was also useful in the development of temporary artificial hearts for children suffering from cardiomyopathy. "This is an important piece of knowledge as we are now gaining more experience with mechanical support for the failing heart in children,'' he said.

Hannah had to take about seven tablets morning and night for the immunosuppression treatment, went through several rounds of cancer treatment, suffered kidney failure and at one point was left barely able to breathe. At one point her family were told she would not survive the next 12 hours.

Prof Yacoub praised her courage and that of her family, saying: "The lesson is don't give up.'' Hannah's mother Liz thanked the donor family whose five-month-old baby daughter provided the transplant heart, saying: "They lost a child, we've gained our child - how can I ever thank them?''

SOURCE

2009-07-14T00:29:00.001+11:30

BBC standards are falling - and bosses are too scared to do anything about it

Peter Sissons, the veteran newsreader who announced his retirement last month, has launched a withering attack on the BBC - claiming standards have fallen and accusing producers of being too mired in political correctness to do anything about it.

Writing in The Mail on Sunday today, he says: 'At today's BBC, a complaint I often heard from senior producers was that they dared not reprimand their subordinates for basic journalistic mistakes - such as getting ages, dates, titles and even football scores wrong - it being politically incorrect to risk offending them.'

Mr Sissons, 66, who has worked for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, says there was 'great attention' to the text of news bulletins when he joined the Corporation 20 years ago, but that now appeared to be lacking.

In a wide-ranging attack, he also claims it is now 'effectively BBC policy' to stifle critics of the consensus view on global warming. He says: 'I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change. 'The Corporation's most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that "the science is settled", when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn't. 'But it is effectively BBC policy... that those views should not be heard.'

He also takes a swipe at BBC executives for failing to defend him when he was criticised for wearing a burgundy tie on the day the Queen Mother died in 2002. He says a senior executive urged him to wear the burgundy tie, but that the BBC then said it had been his own choice.

The reaction of BBC 'top brass' to coverage of the death of Princess Diana also rankles. 'We did a lot to be proud of that day,' he says. 'Some weeks afterwards, the top brass took themselves off to a Cambridge hotel to congratulate each other. None of the footsoldiers who actually made the programmes was invited.'

Mr Sissons once accused the BBC of ageism, saying he had attended 'too many' leaving parties for people over 50.

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British Labour Party fails working class on education

The social mobility czar is to accuse ministers of doing too little to get poor pupils into top universities. Favours aptitude tests (like the American SAT?) as an alternative route to admission! Utter heresy to the modern British Left but it was advocated by the British Left of yesteryear

Gordon Brown's social mobility czar is set to brand Labour’s attempts to bring more working-class pupils into top universities a failure. In a report to be released next week, Alan Milburn, the Blairite former health secretary, is expected to warn that too few bright teenagers from poor families are winning places at leading universities.

The main reason he is likely to identify is the sub-standard education provided by too many state schools, meaning bright pupils are held back from winning good enough A-level grades. Others are deterred by negative advice from staff who guide pupils into low-skilled jobs, assuming they are unsuited to higher education. In addition, much of the £400m spent by the government on schemes to attract more students from deprived backgrounds has been wasted.

Milburn, who has announced he will retire from parliament at the next election, was commissioned by the prime minister in January to report on ways in which more young working-class adults could win jobs in professions such as the law, medicine and teaching. The panel he chairs is likely to conclude that one of the main brakes on social mobility into the professions is slow progress in increasing the number of students from deprived families. Figures released last month showed a slight fall in the proportion from these groups studying at university. The government spends hundreds of millions of pounds on university schemes to attract such candidates and help them through the admissions process. This costs about £10,000 per person, but it is thought many of those who apply would do so regardless of special initiatives.

The report is expected to condemn “positive discrimination” whereby some universities give preferential treatment to any applicant from a poorly performing school. At the same time, however, Milburn is understood to praise more targeted methods. One his panel favours is used by some medical schools - talented pupils from deprived backgrounds can be offered degree places if they achieve lower grades than other candidates, but only if they pass aptitude tests.

Lee Elliot Major, research director of the Sutton Trust, a charity promoting social mobility, said Britain was in the grip of an “education freeze”. “Even when the economy is doing well, children from poorer backgrounds are still only half as likely to attend university as those from more privileged families and even this could understate the problem,” he said.

Milburn’s panel - whose members range from Baroness Shephard, the former Tory education secretary, to Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society - is expected to cite evidence that state school pupils perform at least as well at university as those from independent schools who have scored two grades higher at A-level. This implies that they have been held back by their schools from achieving their full potential.

The findings, which will be seen as an indictment of Labour’s education policies, are likely to anger senior figures such as Ed Balls, the schools secretary. Many in the Labour party have blamed ingrained snobbery at universities for shutting out working-class pupils.

Geoffrey Vos, chairman of the Social Mobility Foundation and a member of Milburn’s panel, said: “Raising the aspirations of pupils ought to be utterly uncontroversial, but it is not always happening.”

Milburn’s report, which has not yet been completed, will focus largely on what the professions themselves can do to widen the social mix of new recruits. It is likely to include steps to pick apart the networking advantages enjoyed by middle-class children. Posts for unpaid work experience and internships, for example, should be filled by formal selection processes rather than word of mouth.

Meanwhile, undergraduates studying for professional degrees should be recruited to a national mentoring network for comprehensive pupils. This would make them more likely to consider going into the professions in a way that those at private and grammar schools instinctively do.

One source said Milburn wants his recommendations to have cross-party support so they have a chance of surviving if the Tories come to power. He is anxious not to alienate middle-class parents worried that children at private and grammar schools will be edged out of leading universities. “Universities have to be carefully nuanced and not attack private schools,” said the source.

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British Pupils need lessons in how to speak properly

Children should be taught to speak more formally in class to improve their written work, according to new research. Teachers need to do more work to improve children's vocabulary and make it clear when the use of slang and colloquialisms are not acceptable, academics have found.

The study from Exeter University, which analysed pupils' writing, discovered that whilst more able writers composed sentences in standard English, weaker writers tended to replicate patterns found in speech.

Researchers concluded that the more opportunities children had in class for developing their speech and distinguishing between styles of language, the better their writing would become. "This is less about correcting their English than making sure that they are aware of what they are saying and giving them access to different repertoires," said Professor Debra Myhill, author of the study. "They need to be aware of what they are saying and when, and be able to make choices about their speech, otherwise they will lose out in areas such as the job market."

The study comes in the wake of growing recognition that the school curriculum has neglected the development of children's speech. The Government's Rose Review, published in May, stressed the "central importance" of speaking and listening as part of literacy. Critics claim that in some schools very young children are being taught to read and write before they can string a sentence together. With older children, chief examiners have revealed a growing tendency for pupils to lapse into the vernacular in exams scripts, using slang and inappropriate expressions.

Pieces of writing from children aged 12 to 15 were analysed as part of the Exeter study, published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. It found that children understood that writing was not simply "talk written down". However, weaker writers used patterns familiar in speech, for instance consistently putting the subject first instead of varying their sentence structure. They also had a more restricted vocabulary reminiscent of the more limited selection of words used in speech.

"In order to develop children's writing more, we need to develop children's talking more," said Prof Myhill. "It is not just about using standard English, it is about having more opportunities in class for children to elaborate, justify their decisions, discuss their ideas and give them access to a broader and richer vocabulary, though reading widely and word searches. "We know that in classrooms that continually provide children with talk opportunities, there will almost certainly be a positive influence on their writing."

The professor said there was a general trend to be less formal in speech and writing. "If you look at the television or newspapers over the past 50 years, the language is less formal. Children's speech and writing is mirroring a much bigger cultural trend. "It is not so much about right and wrong, it is about children having repertoires and judgement. Children need to be able to consciously decide to speak or write in a particular way or not."

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British youngsters view Bible 'as old fashioned'

KNOWLEDGE of the Bible is in decline in Britain, with fewer than one in 20 people able to name all Ten Commandments and youngsters viewing the Christian holy book as "old fashioned", a survey said today.

Forty per cent did not know that the tradition of exchanging Christmas presents originated from the story of the Wise Men bringing gifts for the infant Jesus, while 60 per cent could not name anything about the Good Samaritan, the Durham University study found.

Youngsters were particularly disillusioned, telling researchers that the Bible was "old fashioned", "irrelevant" and for "Dot Cottons" - a reference to the church-going EastEnders' character, the National Biblical Literacy Survey 2009 showed. "It is the first recognition of something which we all knew in our gut. We knew it was there but we weren't exactly willing to face up to it," said Rev Brian D. Brown, a visiting fellow at St.John's College in Durham University.

One respondent to the survey said David and Goliath was the name of a ship while another thought Daniel, who survived being thrown into the lions' den, was "The Lion King".

Rev Brown said the survey showed the need to push for greater religious education among young people as knowledge of the Bible among the under-45 age group was in decline. "We have got to recognise that it (the Bible) is the foundation of our society, upon which our whole culture has been based," he said. "To understand it and to live in it you do need an understanding of the Bible."

Atheists, however, were not unduly worried about the decline in the Bible's popularity. "It shows really that religion is becoming less important to people," said Pepper Harow, campaigns officer at the British Humanist Association. "The fact that people have little knowledge of the Bible perhaps suggests that it's becoming less and less relevant to people in the 21st century," she said.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm about the Bible among the 900 respondents, three-quarters said they owned one and almost a third said it was significant in their lives.

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British officialdom snipes at Prince Charles’s ‘misguided’ green thinking

Senior government figures have revealed serious concerns about the Prince of Wales’s “misguided” green philosophy, which advocates dramatic changes in lifestyle and attitudes as the key to saving the world. One senior Whitehall source dismissed Prince Charles’s green vision as “fatuous”, and others were equally dismissive. The rift illustrates just how politically charged the environmental issues on which Charles has campaigned for decades have now become.

He has long called on people and politicians to rethink their attitudes to the planet, economic growth and consumption. Recently, however, government policy has become based on the notion that problems such as climate change are best addressed through science and technology - without compromising economic growth or consumerism. This difference is becoming a source of tension, and some of Charles’s aides are planning for him to continue to make public his opinions when he eventually becomes king.

Charles, who gave the Richard Dimbleby lecture last week, took care to endorse the climate-change report of the former Downing Street adviser Lord Stern, who, he said, had “set out the case as to why, even in traditional economic terms, it is quite irrational to continue as we are”.

But he went much further, saying our consumerist society had brought the world to the brink of collapse, and warning that “nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust”.

A senior Whitehall source, while not directly criticising the prince, said a “misconceived” ideology lay at the heart of the green position on tackling climate change, wrongly seeking to change our whole way of life. “We are aiming to cut emissions by a third in the next 10 years and then by 80% in the next four decades. These things are not happening because the population has had a green psychological transformation,” he said. “If that were true, we’d never get anywhere, we’d never have got rid of slavery or brought in seatbelts or abolished hanging. No social change is force-driven by mass psychological change. It is about government leading and people changing accordingly.

“Within its core, represented strongly in organisations such as Friends of the Earth andGreenpeace, environmentalism still has an ideological greenness that does not like the way we live and does not believe this is what creates fundamentally decent society. That continues to infect the way they think about the changes that we need, so in that sense it is fundamentally wrong.”

Charles has selected two former directors of Friends of the Earth (FoE) to advise him: Jonathon Porritt, who ran FoE from 1984-90, and Tony Juniper, who quit last year for the Prince’s Rainforest Project. Craig Bennett, a former FoE campaigner, co-directs the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change. Last year the prince also recruited Benet Northcote, former chief policy adviser for Greenpeace UK, as his deputy private secretary. Charles’s green advisers contributed to the speech, which contained pointed references to the management of the economy. He said the Earth could no longer afford consumerism, and that the “age of convenience” was over.

A senior Whitehall source sought to avoid criticising the prince personally, and said: “We would never say that Prince Charles is wrong. It all helps. I would not say that it is of no use, but that it is not enough and we are going to get on with it anyway.” However, he also said lifestyle and thinking changes - which have been advocated by Charles - were “third-order issues” in terms of the impact they have in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. They included making personal decisions, such as to cycle or walk to work rather than drive, or to take holidays within Britain, or to eat meat only once a week.

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Swearing can help reduce pain

Even the most mild-mannered of individuals have been known to utter the odd expletive in moments of intense pain. Now it seems they have the perfect excuse. Swearing helps reduce pain, according to new research.

A study of responses to pain found that people who cursed in response to pain could cope with being hurt for nearly 50 per cent longer than their clean-speaking peers.

When they started their research, experts at Keele University's School of Psychology thought that cursing would lower pain tolerance. But after monitoring the reactions of 64 volunteers, stunned research leader Dr Richard Stephens and colleagues John Atkins and Andrew Kingston found that swearing actually had a beneficial effect. Last night Dr Stephens told how he came up with the idea for the study after blurting out a swear word when he accidentally hit his thumb with a hammer as he built a shed in his garden.

The 64 undergraduates were subjected to a gruelling ice water test to see how the cursing affected their pain tolerance. First they had to submerge their hand in a tub of ice water for as long as possible while repeating a swearword of their choice. Then they repeated the exercise - but using a word they would choose to describe a table. Despite initial expectations, researchers found volunteers could keep their hands in ice for longer when repeating the swear word. On average, the students could put up with the pain for nearly two minutes when swearing. By contrast when they refrained from using expletives they could only endure the ice for one minute and 15 seconds.

Researchers believe swearing has a pain-reducing effect because it triggers the body's natural fight-or-flight response. They suggest that the accelerated heart rates of the volunteers repeating the swearword indicates an increase in aggression, in a classic fight-or-flight response of downplaying being hurt in favour of a more pain-tolerant machismo.

Dr Stephens said it was clear the swearing triggered both an emotional and a physical response. 'We are not sure why swearing works like this, but when it happens it's accompanied by an increase in heart rate,' he said. 'It could be the aggression of swearing, the machismo, makes you more pain resistant.'

While surprised by the results he added: 'It might explain why the centuries-old practice of cursing developed and still persists today.' For those who think that the results may give a green card to turning the air blue, Dr Stephens did, however, have a word of warning. 'If they want to use this pain-lessening effect to their advantage they need to do less casual swearing and only do it when they really need it.'

Rohan Byrt, spokesman for the Casual Swearing Appreciation Society, said he thought the study was the first time swearing's benefits had been proved. He said:'"I've always thought that swearing does have some real therapeutic merit. 'Even for those who consider themselves clean spoken, the odd swear word will just slip out. For me, it's almost a natural instinct, a gut reaction'

SOURCE

2009-07-13T00:22:00.000+11:30

Perverse British justice again

Teenage rapist charged with new sex attack just eight days after judge let him walk free. One often gets the impression that the only serious offence in Leftist Britain is being middle class

The Attorney General has been asked to investigate the case of a rapist who was allowed to walk free from court with a community sentence - and allegedly struck again just days later. The 16-year-old, who admitted raping a minor and a series of other sexual offences, is accused of committing a further rape just eight days after his release. The teenager - who cannot be identified for legal reasons - received a three-year community rehabilitation order instead of the custodial sentence which the police and families of the victims had expected.

Immediately after the case, Crown Prosecution Service lawyers wrote to the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, in an attempt to use the Unduly Lenient Sentence procedure to have the case considered for referral to the Court of Appeal. The rarely used measure allows the CPS to request a review of any sentence it believes falls below guidelines.

According to police sources, senior detectives involved in the case were dismayed and frustrated that the teenager was allowed to return to his home on the council estate where the first rape took place. The original case was dealt with at a Crown Court earlier this year. Following the latest alleged attack, the teenager has appeared at a youth court charged with raping a boy and causing a boy to engage in sexual activity. This time the teenager was remanded in custody for committal proceedings.

Meanwhile, his close-knit local community has been left in a state of disbelief by the chain of events, with friends and family of the victims incensed he was let out to allegedly attack again. The teenager was allegedly known by police for his sexual interest in young boys. Last night, one mother who lives locally said: 'This youth is a danger to children. It is beyond belief that he was not locked away to protect kiddies in the area. This latest incident has left everyone sickened because he has been a real threat in this area for some time. 'It is inconceivable that he was allowed to return home and back to this neighbourhood. The courts should have done something about him and we feel that we've been let down.'

As part of the three-year community rehabilitation order, the youth, who is now 16, would have received counselling sessions to address his behaviour and supervision from probation officers. The judge, who cannot be named for legal reasons, would also have ruled that the teenager be placed on the Sex Offenders Register and must attend meetings with social services. But a legal source said last night: 'What he received was the soft option and it allowed him to be released back to the area where his victims lived. 'As a result of him being freed he was arrested again, but this time he was placed in custody. The system failed because he should have been imprisoned for his initial offences. This was not a one-off offence, it was a catalogue of sexual offending.'

The accused boy's family - he lived with his mother after his parents separated - have since left the area and moved into a safe house following threats.

A neighbour claims that the boy's mother had pleaded with social services to take him into care, but was ignored. During the original Crown Court case, the judge heard that the victim had been lured to the boy's bedroom, where he was assaulted. The alarm was raised after the victim later told his parents about the incident. The court was asked to take a further three sexual assaults of minors into consideration when sentencing.

The Ministry of Justice said last night that the maximum sentence for rape is life, whatever the ages of the perpetrator or victim. If the victim is under 13, the starting point is 10 years' imprisonment. Normally a sentence falls between eight and 13 years, but a judge can waver from these guidelines if there are aggravating or mitigating circumstances. The spokesman said: 'Normally there would be a custodial sentence of some degree. Six years if possible or even four years. But to go from an eight-year minimum sentence to a community order is a huge leap. 'Our official line is that this is a matter for the courts and the Attorney General to consider a sentence which may be unduly lenient.'

The CPS confirmed that the sentence has been referred to the Attorney General for consideration under the Unduly Lenient Sentence procedure. 'It is for the Attorney General to decide whether to refer the sentence to the Court of Appeal,' the spokesman added.

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British school pupils told: Sex every day keeps the GP away

And they wonder why Britain has a huge problem of teenage pregnancy and abortion

A National Health Service leaflet is advising school pupils that they have a “right” to an enjoyable sex life and that regular intercourse can be good for their cardiovascular health.

The advice appears in guidance circulated to parents, teachers and youth workers, and is intended to update sex education by telling pupils about the benefits of sexual pleasure. For too long, say its authors, experts have concentrated on the need for “safe sex” and loving relationships while ignoring the main reason that many people have sex, that is, for enjoyment.

The document, called Pleasure, has been drawn up by NHS Sheffield, although it is also being circulated outside the city.

Alongside the slogan “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”, it says: “Health promotion experts advocate five portions of fruit and veg a day and 30 minutes’ physical activity three times a week. What about sex or masturbation twice a week?”

Steve Slack, director of the Centre for HIV and Sexual Health at NHS Sheffield, who is one of the authors, argues that, far from promoting teenage sex, it could encourage young people to delay losing their virginity until they are sure they will enjoy the experience.

Slack believes that as long as teenagers are fully informed about sex and are making their decisions free of peer pressure and as part of a caring relationship, they have as much right as an adult to a good sex life.

Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, Berkshire, who introduced classes in emotional wellbeing, said the approach was “deplorable”.

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Britain's young generation can now not add up

Huge decline in numeracy

When the Bamberger family opened a haberdashery 65 years ago, they insisted their staff use mental arithmetic to price up customers' purchases. Despite the arrival of calculators, that attitude has remained unchanged over the intervening years. But now the family finds itself facing an unexpected maths problem - most youngsters it would like to employ are incapable of working out sums in their heads.

Colin Bamberger, 82, whose parents founded the Remnant Shop in 1944, said that less than one in ten applicants are now able to solve basic maths problems without turning to a calculator or till. In the past, around eight in ten made the grade. Mr Bamberger, who stills runs one of the family's two stores, yesterday blamed the decline on falling education standards and over-reliance on the pocket calculator. He said: 'Most of the youngsters who come to us for jobs are unemployable because they are not numerate.

'It is a sorry situation and a poor reflection on the academic qualities of young people these days. I think it shows modern teaching methods are sadly lacking. 'It is all very well using calculators but if you have not got some idea what the answer is, how do you know if you have pushed the right button? It's so easy to make a mistake. Around eight out of ten people who came to us for work were capable of doing it in the 1950s and 1960s - but now it is less than one in ten. 'You ask them how much they would charge for nine metres of material at £9.90 a metre and they fiddle about for ages.'

He said that mental arithmetic was essential in his shops because, if customers queried the final bill, staff could scribble their calculations on a piece of paper to show them how they arrived at the sum. With calculators, all customers are presented with is the final figure. 'The problem is people are not taught multiplication tables in school any more,' Mr Bamberger added. 'Paper qualifications these days are just not important to us. 'It is reflected in the fact that many of our staff are a lot older. The modern generation just don't seem to have the skill.'

The Remnant Shop was founded in 1944 by Colin's mother Betty, who sold material and haberdashery from her first-floor flat in Felixstowe, Suffolk. It proved so successful that her husband Sydney soon gave up his job as a commercial traveller to help with the business. A year later, Mr Bamberger joined the family business after studying mathematics and chemistry at Bristol University. The business expanded when his son Robert opened a second shop in Colchester in 1996. The business, which employs 28 staff, stocks 5,500 items of haberdashery, including pins, needles, ribbons and wool as well as 5,000 rolls of fabric used for curtains, crafts and dressmaking.

Robert said that even if applicants were 'massive at marketing, super at sales or even Alan Sugar's next apprentice - if they can't add up quickly in their head we won't have them'. 'My grandfather could add up a column of 50 figures in old pounds, shillings and pennies - including ha'pennies and farthings - in a matter of seconds,' he added. 'He used to insist that any staff we took on could do the same and we have carried on that practice.'

Last year, it emerged more than half of trainee teachers needed multiple attempts to pass a basic numeracy test. Although the exam was originally introduced to drive up standards, it emerged that trainees could take it as many times as they like. One reportedly took the test 28 times before passing.

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Official British police policy: Incitement to violence is OK if Muslims do it

We read:

"In a bid to stop Muslim extremists from becoming more militant, the UK Government is set to issue a guideline for police, directing them not to charge them in many hate crime cases, a move that has created outrage amongst critics.

Guidelines will tell forces to press for conviction only in cases of clear-cut criminal acts, and refrain from proceeding when evidence of lawbreaking is “borderline.”

Officers will be advised to turn a blind eye on crimes such as incitement to religious hatred or viewing extremist material on the Internet.

“For instance, where there has been incitement or someone has been on the internet there can be a grey area where there is some discretion and it would be more sensible to avoid going down the criminal route,” the Daily Express quoted a White Hall source, as saying.

Critics, however, saw the move as a politically correct attempt to appease extremists who hate Britain, and warned that the move could mean Islamic radicals being give the freedom to encourage violence.

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Abject surrender. No equality before the law. How far can the Leftist destruction of British society go? Britain has been run by the Left for 12 years. What would 12 years of Democrat government do to America? Just the first 7 months have seen ominous changes. Fortunately, Americans get to vote every two years. The Brits have to wait five years.

Meet The Man Who Has Exposed The Great Climate Change Con Trick

An excerpt below from The Spectator, mainstream journal of British conservatism

James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book

Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the $7.4 trillion cap and trade (carbon-trading) bill — the largest tax in American history — which President Obama and his cohorts are so assiduously trying to impose on the US economy.

Imagine no more, for your fairy godmother is here. His name is Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, and he has recently published the landmark book Heaven And Earth, which is going to change forever the way we think about climate change.

‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.

To find out why, let’s meet the good professor. He’s a tanned, rugged, white-haired sixtysomething — courteous and jolly but combative when he needs to be — glowing with the health of a man who spends half his life on field expeditions to Iran, Turkey and his beloved Outback. And he’s sitting in my garden drinking tea on exactly the kind of day the likes of the Guardian’s George Monbiot would probably like to ban. A lovely warm sunny one.

So go on then, Prof. What makes you sure that you’re right and all those scientists out there saying the opposite are wrong? ‘I’m a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.’

What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere — to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction — is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods — such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall — were times of wealth and plenty.

All this is scientific fact — which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality.

‘I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.’

Plimer’s uncompromising position has not made him popular. ‘They say I rape cows, eat babies, that I know nothing about anything. My favourite letter was the one that said: “Dear sir, drop dead”. I’ve also had a demo in Sydney outside one of my book launches, and I’ve had mothers coming up to me with two-year-old children in their arms saying: “Don’t you have any kind of morality? This child’s future is being destroyed.’’’ Plimer’s response to the last one is typically robust. ‘If you’re so concerned, why did you breed?’

This no-nonsense approach may owe something to the young Ian’s straitened Sydney upbringing. His father was crippled with MS, leaving his mother to raise three children on a schoolteacher’s wage. ‘We couldn’t afford a TV — not that TV even arrived in Australia till 1956. We’d use the same brown paper bag over and over again for our school lunches, always turn off the lights, not because of some moral imperative but out of sheer bloody necessity.’

One of the things that so irks him about modern environmentalism is that it is driven by people who are ‘too wealthy’. ‘When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.’

More HERE

Everyone in Britain will soon get untested vaccine against swine flu

This seems amazingly precipitous. The reasoning is clearly that MOST people will be OK and damn the minority. I think I would rather take my chances with the flu rather than risk Guillain-Barré syndrome

The NHS is preparing to vaccinate the entire population against swine flu after the disease claimed the life of its first healthy British patient. A new vaccine is expected to arrive in Britain in the next few weeks and could be fast-tracked through regulatory approval in five days. As many as 20m people could be inoculated this year. Ministers have secured up to 90m doses, and the rest of the population is likely to be offered vaccinations next year.

A man from Essex was confirmed on Friday as the first person without underlying health problems to have died from the virus. The health department said most people with the virus had only mild symptoms.

Peter Holden, the British Medical Association’s lead negotiator on swine flu, said GPs’ surgeries were ready for one of the biggest vaccination campaigns in almost 50 years. “If this virus does [mutate], it can get a lot more nasty, and the idea is to give people immunity. But the sheer logistics of dealing with 60m people can’t be underestimated,” he said. The health department said a vaccination programme would be drawn up based on expert advice.

The path of a popular medicine from the laboratory to the chemist or doctor’s surgery can involve years of clinical trials on a select group of patients. When the new vaccine for swine flu arrives in Britain, regulators said this weekend, it could be approved for use in just five days.

Regulators at the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) said the fast-tracked procedure has involved clinical trials of a “mock-up” vaccine similar to the one that will be used for the biggest mass vaccination programme in generations. It will be introduced into the general population while regulators continue to carry out simultaneous clinical trials.

The first patients in the queue for the jab - being supplied to the UK by GSK and Baxter Healthcare - may understandably be a little nervous at any possible side effects. A mass vaccination campaign against swine flu in America was halted in the 1970s after some people suffered Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disorder of the nervous system.

However, regulators said fast-tracking would not be at the expense of patient safety. “The vaccines are authorised with a detailed risk management plan,” the EMEA said. “There is quite a body of evidence regarding safety on the trials of the mock-up, and the actual vaccine could be assessed in five days.”

The UK government has ordered enough vaccine to cover the entire population. GPs are being told to prepare for a nationwide vaccination campaign. Dr Peter Holden, the British Medical Association’s lead negotiator on swine flu, who has been attending Department of Health meetings on the outbreak, said GPs’ surgeries were prepared for one of the biggest vaccination campaigns in almost 50 years.

He said although swine flu was not causing serious illness in patients, health officials were eager to start a mass vaccination campaign, starting first on priority groups. First, the jabs would reduce the chances of a shortage of hospital beds because of people suffering from swine flu. Second, it would reduce the effect on the economy by ensuring workers were protected from the virus. “The high-risk groups will be done at GPs’ surgeries. People are still making decisions over this, but we want to get cracking before we get a second wave, which is traditionally far more virulent.”

Holden said it was likely the elderly would be given their seasonal flu jab as well as the swine flu vaccination. The new vaccine is likely to require two doses.

Details of the inoculation plans emerged after the death of a patient, reportedly a middle-aged man, at a hospital in the Basildon area of Essex. The victim had no underlying health problems, but officials say there is no evidence the swine flu virus had mutated into a more dangerous strain.

Holden said it would be the biggest campaign in response to an outbreak since mass vaccination against smallpox in 1962. He said surgeries would be aiming to inoculate about 30 people an hour in a “military-style operation”. The Department of Health said it had still not finalised which groups would be vaccinated first, but children, frontline health workers, people with underlying illnesses and the elderly are likely to take priority.

The European Commission is also identifying population groups which it believes should get priority. It is keen to ensure that countries such as the UK, which had ordered supplies of the vaccine in advance, do not cause inequities in treatment elsewhere in Europe. It warned health ministers in a note circulated last month that if the vaccines were more readily available in some countries it could cause “vaccine tourism/shopping in other member states”.

About 15 people have died of swine flu in Britain, but most of those infected get only mild symptoms. According to the latest figures from the Health Protection Agency, the UK has had 9,718 confirmed cases of the disease.

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More Britons are emigrating to Australia

More Britons are emigrating, and they don't have to be young and carefree to join the exodus. Consider the choices of Britons joining the 2.26 million jobless queue, with rain outside and peeling paint within. If they are of a generation that enjoyed the sun-kissed, carefree bliss of the backpacker trail, this increasingly is the moment to swap recession-hit Britain for balmy and relatively buoyant Australia. British unemployment has reached 7.2 per cent, a 12-year high, and thousands of people are preparing to follow the masses of Australians going home to an economy which has largely avoided recession.

There is nothing new about British immigration, of course. Tens of thousands arrived under the postwar £10 Poms scheme, encouraged by a labour-hungry Australia willing to subsidise their passage and determined to preserve Australian whiteness. But money frequently is no longer the guiding principle for today's crop of often comfortable departees from the old dart. Quality of life is the new holy grail; many can fall back on sizeable cash reserves accumulated during boom times.

Not everyone is invited to the party though. In a world where sophisticated immigration policies have been tailored to the needs of individual labour markets, the door is open only to a "migrant elite" with specified skills. Unlike earlier generations, large numbers have no intention of returning to Britain.

Typical are members of the Mercer family from the Wirral, north-western England, who are set to move to Australia this year. "My expectation is that Australia is a land of opportunities where hard work will be recognised in a way that I think is taken for granted here," says Tony Mercer, 31, whose property business went bust in the economic storm last year.

An aircraft engineer by trade, his skills did not meet the qualifying criteria because he had not used them for years. Instead, the Mercers secured the points needed to move to Australia because his hairdresser wife Jane's skills are in demand. With Samuel, 7, and Jessica, 4, the Mercers have chosen Adelaide. Aside from air fares, a family of four is likely to pay about $10,000 in the visa application process, a system the Mercers describe as "a minefield".

Unsurprisingly, inquiries have shot up at the Emigration Group, a British company employing former Australian immigration staff who help with visa applications. "More people are having serious concerns about the future of this country," says an Emigration Group director, Paul Arthur. Increasingly his customers are young, middle-class professionals citing high taxes, poor weather and poor services as reasons for emigrating. The vast majority are homeowners, although the stagnant property market has meant some are biding their time before they raise the capital needed.

Another option for those wanting to emigrate is to study overseas. One British company, Study Options, has taken on extra staff to place Britons in Australian and New Zealand universities. Co-founder Stefan Watts reports a surge in business from professionals wanting to ride out the recession by taking time to study. Mr Watts sees more clients who are older, in their late 20s or 30s, and time poor. Many look forward to returning to a country they once backpacked around and are unfazed at getting little or no support to pay fees such as the typical $17,000 for undergraduate degree courses.

Will Morrin, a 38-year-old from Glasgow who was made redundant last year from his job as a broker, is about to embark on a three-year radiography degree at Newcastle in NSW, even though he was accepted for a similar degree in Britain with no fees to pay. "I have savings and had been doing a bit of thinking so I sold the car and the house. Weighing it up, what's important is the quality of life," he says. "Weather is the No.1 draw and getting away from the rat race. Things in the UK will only get worse once interest rates kick in." Once qualified in a sought-after profession, he may stay for four years to qualify for Australian citizenship or move to Canada, another economic lifeboat of choice for many...

Traditionally Britons emigrated in good years and stayed put in uncertain economic times. The sign from this recession, however, is a bucking of those traditions. Immigration peaked in 2007 and began to decline early last year, but picked up again in the second half of 2008, according to the Office for National Statistics. More than 165,000 British nationals had emigrated in the first seven months of last year.

This year's yet-to-be published Brits Abroad report by the Institute for Public Policy Research will show most British migrants are highly skilled, although the net loss of such workers seems to be decreasing. Work, lifestyle and adventure are listed as the three main reasons for leaving. The big surprise, however, is in the flexibility afforded by technologies that promote and facilitate remote working. More people are having their cake and eating it, emigrating while retaining jobs back in Britain.

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More British bungling: "New vehicles purchased to protect British troops in Afghanistan have already been rejected as unsafe by the US military. The vehicles failed basic 'survivability' tests, which showed soldiers would be left vulnerable to roadside bombs, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. But although the Pentagon rejected them, the Ministry of Defence has ordered 262 to replace the controversial Snatch Land Rovers. In contrast, the Americans have now ordered a more robust model - at half the £600,000 cost of the vehicle the British have dubbed the 'Husky'. The disclosure, at the end of the blackest week for British forces in Afghanistan, came as Gordon Brown responded to growing anger over the death toll by promising to improve troops' equipment.

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

2009-07-12T00:07:00.001+11:30

Report: 'White flight' causes growing school segregation in Britain

White parents are pulling their children out of schools where they are outnumbered by ethnic-minority pupils, according to a report that shows increasing segregation in Britain. The Institute of Community Cohesion (iCoCo) studied 13 areas, including Bristol, Bolton, Sunderland and Blackburn, and questioned parents. Middle-class parents — who are usually white — were removing children from schools with growing populations of ethnic minorities because they didn’t want them to stand out, the authors of the report said. “We heard strong evidence of ‘white flight’ in some areas,” the report said.

It concluded: “Despite the fact that most people we spoke to in focus groups wanted their children to have a mixed education, parental choice tended to push people to what they saw as the safe option, where children with similar backgrounds went.” The report also found that in areas where schools were monocultural, parents sent their child to the school dominated by pupils from their own ethnic background.

Nick Johnston, one of the authors and a policy director at the iCoCo, said that parents did not want their child to be odd ones out. “People don’t mind a diverse school but what they do mind is their kid being in a visible minority. This trend has increased in the last few years,” he said.In one school in Blackburn, once the number of non-white pupils rose above 60 per cent, white parents started saying that they did not want their children to feel different.

At another unnamed school, 85 per cent of the pupils were white British at the end of 2005. During the next two terms pupils from 15 to 20 Somali families joined.

Johnston suggested that councils should consider using lotteries to increase school diversity. [i.e. the bastard wants to thwart attempts by the parents to keep their kids safe]

SOURCE

The dumbing down of British education never stops

Academics condemn the maths A-level made easy

A 'dumbed down' maths A-level which includes questions on personal finance and allows advanced calculators has been criticised by more than 60 leading academics. The new A-level in 'use of maths' could be introduced in schools from 2011 alongside traditional maths courses. Draft papers reveal that pupils will be allowed to use graphical calculators for the first time and have to answer questions about converting pounds to euros while on holiday.

Dozens of top mathematicians fear the exam will 'cannibalise' the existing qualification and end up replacing it in many schools. They are concerned that pupils will be steered towards the 'easier' qualification to help schools meet exam targets, only to find many universities do not accept it. The academics are calling for the Government's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to abandon the exam. Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove has also attacked it as a 'bluffer's guide' to A-level maths.

In a letter to the QCA, the group Educators for Reform warns that the compulsory units covering topics such as algebra and calculus are 'considerably less demanding' than the traditional exam. The optional units are a 'hotch potch' which will not give pupils a solid foundation in the subject, they say. Instead of sketching graphs, pupils will be able to copy them from the screen of a graphical calculator.

Academics say the course also provides pupils with data sheets that lead to a 'sat nav' approach to examining, rather than letting them think for themselves. There is also a greater emphasis on practical activities and personal finance, including, in draft papers, a question on the cost of hiring a car in France. Professor Nick Shepherd-Barron, of Cambridge University, said there was a danger that British youngsters would be less well educated than competitors abroad.

But Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: 'We cannot continue teaching an outdated 19th century curriculum. This is simply turning many children off education because it is completely not relevant to them at all.'

SOURCE

More official British racism

Gipsy and traveller children get priority at popular state schools

Gipsy and traveller children are being given priority admission to popular state schools, it emerged yesterday. Schools are being told to offer places to such children even if they are full or have a long waiting list. They must take in the pupils even if travellers 'are camped on the roadside and may not be here long', according to Government guidance.

Traveller children can also be registered at two schools at once, with their place at a 'base' school kept open for as long as they might need it, even if other children are on a waiting list. Further guidance states that schools should 'doubly scrutinise' any decision to expel a traveller or gipsy child.

Teachers warned that the rules - which are intended to help children who have traditionally suffered a fragmented education were being 'very rigorously applied', fuelling resentment among local taxpayers.

Concerns were raised in the wake of news that doctors have been told that gipsies and travellers should be given priority in NHS hospitals and GP surgeries. Health Service guidelines state they should be fast-tracked to see doctors, nurses and even some dentists. GPs have also been told to see any travellers who simply walk in without an appointment, even if all consultation times for the day are taken up.

According to mandatory Government guidance, traveller children must be considered under 'fair access protocols' when they request school places. These protocols also extend to several other groups, including children of UK service personnel and other Crown Servants, as well as those with special educational needs and young carers. They also cover youngsters who attended special units for expelled pupils and are now ready to be reintegrated into ordinary schools.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: 'The vast majority of children get a place at their first choice school, but it is absolutely right that disadvantaged groups can get back on track with their education quickly when they move to a new area. 'Everyone, regardless of background, should have fair and equal access to a place of their choice.' [Well why is that denied to many white British middle-class families?]

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Fury as NHS trust says only women between 39.5 and 40 years old can have IVF

Which, aside from anything else, makes it most likely to be futile. You wonder if it's human beings who are making these decisions. It shows you how low bureaucratically-run medicine can sink

Infertile women have been told they can only have IVF treatment if they are aged between 39 and a half and 40. The 'cruel and bizarre' restrictions were put in place by NHS managers in North Yorkshire struggling to deal with a huge deficit at their health trust. It could mean women with severe fertility problems to wait years for one cycle of IVF treatment. Between the age of 35 and 40, the chance of conception for women halves - and the heart breaking delays will further reduce the chance of having a baby for dozens of women.

The rules were greeted with incredulity by charities. Susan Seenan, from Infertility Network UK, said: 'This policy really is one of the worst we have ever encountered amid the postcode lottery for IVF. 'We have seen some bad policies in other parts of the country, but this is not just cruel, it is bizarre, and it flies in the face of the medical evidence that the best treatment for fertility is to start early.' 'If you seek fertility treatment, and you are told to wait until you are almost 40, at a point when your chances of conception will be massively diminished, if there is any way you can manage to pay for it, you will seek private care. 'The tragedy is for those couples who do not have that option.'

The severe restrictions were put in place by NHS North Yorkshire and York in order to cut its spending. Two couples said they were forced to go private because the health trust would not fund the IVF. They had their treatment at Leeds General Infirmary, alongside couples who lived in a neighbouring primary care trust area who received their treatment for free.

One couple from Harrogate, who now have a three-week-old daughter, following private infertility treatment, said they were 'incredulous' when their consultant explained why they could not receive NHS treatment. The man, aged 40, and his wife, who is now 33, said that even their GP was not aware of the policy. Guidance from the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence says women should be offered three cycles of IVF treatment free on the NHS, if they have had fertility problems for three years, are aged between 23 and 39, are not obese and do not smoke. The cost of three cycles is around £15,000.

But around three quarters of primary care trusts are providing less IVF treatment. Many reduce to pay for IVF treatment to women below the age of 30. But none are as restrictive as North Yorkshire and York primary care trust, where just 16 women were given IVF treatment in the last year. The PCT said the vast majority of those cases involved women aged between 39 years and six months and 40, but said it was possible for younger women to be granted the treatment if their circumstances were deemed to be 'exceptional'. Managers would not define exceptional, although families in North Yorkshire said it only covered occasions where one of the prospective parents was terminally ill.

NHS North Yorkshire and York PCT said decided to stop routinely funding IVF treatment in May 2007, as part of a plan to tackle its financial problems. All women who were on the waiting list for treatment at the point it was frozen have now been scheduled to have IVF by September of this year. The trust said it was currently reviewing its policy covering women referred since May 2007, and future patients. It said it aimed to ensure that by next April it could remove its age restrictions on treatment, and offer all couples one cycle of treatment.

PCT strategy director David Cockayne said: 'As part of our financial recovery plan, which began in early 2007, the PCT's board had to take some very difficult decisions on what clinical priorities it would pursue.'

Of the 32,000 people who have fertility treatment each year, around three-quarters pay privately for the treatment, which has a success rate of around 25 per cent per cycle.

SOURCE

More child abuse by Left-trained and hate-filled British social workers

I want to come home mummy: Aged five, 'Jenny' was torn from her parents by social workers after an RSPCA raid. Now a court says she must be adopted... We reveal disturbing questions about the fate of this bewildered child who faces fears of abandonment for years to come but who just wants to come home to mummy and daddy. It all began when parenbts weren't humble enough during a misdirected police raid

The recording begins with the sound of a child's voice. It belongs to a little girl and she is clearly bewildered and distressed. At one point she begins to cry. At other times she is sobbing uncontrollably. 'Have you seen the judge yet?' she can be heard asking pitifully in between the tears before pleading: 'I want to go home with [you] Mummy and Daddy.' The recording - and dozens of others just like it - was made during a supervised meeting between the youngster and her parents after their daughter was taken away from them by social workers.

They are known as 'contact visits' in the soulless vernacular of the care system, and took place in a room with a table and chairs and a few toys. One hour. Once a month. That's the extent of the relationship now between this little seven-year-old girl and her traumatised parents.

There are some parents who do not deserve to see their children more than once a month. Irresponsible parents. Neglectful parents. Abusive parents. According to care workers, the mother and father of this little girl were found to fall into this category after their home was raided by the RSPCA and at least 18 police officers to deal with a complaint about supposed mistreatment of dogs.

But what if social workers have got it wrong? In the light of Baby P and so many other scandals, it's hardly impossible is it? Certainly, the recordings stored on a computer at the family's home on the South Coast seem to contradict the damaging claims by social services that the girl, whom we shall call Jenny - the girl's real identity has been suppressed by the courts - did not wish to return to live with her parents.

Jenny's father spent months taking down every word of the recordings by hand, only to be told by a judge that they had to be professionally transcribed. By the time they were, it was too late. Moves to put Jenny up for adoption were under way. This week, after 74 separate court hearings over two harrowing years, the family finally lost their fight to have Jenny returned to them. The Court of Appeal in London ruled that their daughter must be given up for adoption. If and when she is, they may never see her again.

Jenny was five when she was taken away, and seven now. Before we examine the peculiarly troubling details of this case, it is worth considering the comments of the family's MP, Charles Hendry. He says: 'This case has concerned me more than any other in my 13 years as a member of Parliament.' And, he went on to describe Jenny's mother and father as 'devoted parents'.

Furthermore, one of the experts brought in to examine the child's removal, a psychiatric social worker, concluded the local authority had 'mismanaged the case'. Needless to say, his advice was ignored.

They are not lone voices: more than 200 local people, including neighbours, friends and members of the couple's church, planned to take part in a march through their village shortly after the family's ordeal began in April 2007. Posters were printed, which read 'Social Services Have Kidnapped Our Daughter. Please Help The Fight To Get Her Back Where She Belongs.' Above the words was a picture of Jenny. Of course, you won't have read about the protest, because it never took place. The march was just about to begin when the police, acting on the advice of social services, stepped in.

They warned Jenny's parents they risked being jailed, as they had broken the law by identifying their daughter on the placards. Just another example of the terrifying lack of transparency that now surrounds the removal of children from their families. Reforms to open up cases such as Jenny's to public scrutiny were introduced earlier this year. But the truth is, an almost Stalinist culture of secrecy still exists in family courts.

Jenny was never physically harmed, and was 'thriving and happy before being taken away', the Court of Appeal was told. One of the reasons for the decision was that Jenny's father had been unwilling to undergo a further assessment. Wouldn't other parents in his position have done the same? After all, the case had already dragged on for two years and he believed yet another 'assessment' would delay the tortuous process even more.

Yet, here we are today on the cusp of Jenny being spirited away from her family for ever. No one suggests that Jenny's parents - whom we'll call Susan and Richard - are perfect. But over the past few weeks, our reporters have come to know the family. And one thing seems undeniable - their love for their daughter, and her love for them.

Jenny is a beautiful child with a mop of chestnut hair. She loved ballet, swimming and Susan and Richard paid for her to have private tennis lessons. Her bedroom - with her own ensuite bathroom - in the family's home is almost unchanged from the day she last slept there. Her favourite pink teddy bear is still sitting under the windowsill. And a collection of her videos are on a shelf. 'She loved Grease and pretending to be Olivia Newton-John,' her mother told me last night as her eyes filled up with tears. 'It's hard to come into my daughter's room without crying.'

Susan, in her 40s and involved in her local Conservative Association, used to be a beautician before becoming a fulltime mother - that was how important her child was to her. Her husband Richard, 32, runs a dog breeding business from their home. They have been married for 13 years.

They were just a normal, happy family, it seems, until the RSPCA, backed up by 18 police officers, arrived at their house early one April morning in 2007, following a tip-off that dogs were being mistreated, and that there might be guns in the house. No guns were ever found. No criminal charges were brought, nor does Richard have a criminal record. He was later, however, convicted of docking the tails of his puppies. But the raid was to have far more catastrophic consequences.

Both Richard and Susan were arrested for failing to cooperate with officers. By the time they were released from custody later that day, Jenny was the subject of an emergency protection order. So an operation which had begun for entirely different reasons had ended with the heartbreak of their daughter being taken away.

There were two reasons for what happened, and both have been bitterly contested by the family. The first was the state of the house. Police said it was covered in rabbit entrails - used as food for the dogs they raised - and animal excrement. The couple claim most of the mess was caused during the raid. They say, the doors were left open, allowing the dogs in. Normally, they insisted, their home was 'clean and tidy'. Only a few weeks earlier a policewoman had visited them - after a puppy had been stolen - and backed up what they said. She also said that Jenny was 'happy'. Their home, it should also be stressed, was always immaculate when we visited the couple.

Attention was drawn to the fact that there was a hole in a downstairs bedroom ceiling. But the family point out that a pipe had recently leaked and could not be repaired until the beams had dried out. It has now been fixed. Nor, it was claimed by the authorities, were there any clothes for Jenny in her wardrobe. Did the police look in the wrong wardrobe - the one in her parent's bedroom? The wardrobe in Jenny's own bedroom, her parents say, was full of her belongings.

'We always put Jenny first,' said Susan. 'We have receipts from Monsoon [the fashion store] proving we spent hundreds of pounds on Jenny in the couple of months before she was taken from us. If anything, we spoilt her.'

The second reason, according to social services, that Jenny was not returned to her parents, was that she had apparently made it clear she didn't want to return to the house. But why would she? Jenny was later diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following the raid. 'They were raided like criminals, it is disgusting' In fact, it would be impossible to imagine a more traumatic situation than the 'chaotic scenes' which unfolded at the house that morning and which culminated in her mother and father being led away in handcuffs. In other words, not wanting to return home didn't necessarily mean she didn't want to be with her parents.

Those tapes made during 'contact meetings' in which she tearfully begs to be returned to her 'Mummy and Daddy' would seem to confirm this. 'She was hysterical when the police came in,' says Susan. 'It's the damage they have done to our little girl which really concerns us. I fear she will never be the same.'

More HERE

Britain's obesity capital resists health drive

Officialdom have tried it all but people still insist on eating what they like

On the front line of Britain’s fight against obesity lies a town with a guilty secret — it has an abiding passion for pork pies. Stockton-on-Tees eats more of them than anywhere else in the region according to suppliers, who sell off surplus pies to local butchers. Perhaps that’s one reason why the town was named as the country’s capital for childhood obesity in Department of Health figures released this week.

One in six children starting primary school in the borough is obese and by the time they leave for secondary school, 20 per cent of pupils fall into the same category. More than one in three 11-year-olds are either overweight or obese.

Another community confronted by such statistics might have shuffled away behind closed doors into chipmunching, couch-potato denial. However, when the scale and cost of the problem became apparent two years ago, Stockton’s leaders decided to tackle the issue head on. Treating diseases related directly to obesity cost local NHS trusts £26.9 million in 2007. By 2015, unless action is taken, the bill could rise to £33.5 million.

To visit this post-industrial town today is to encounter a testing ground for every conceivable initiative designed to help people to lose weight. Whether any of them will work remains to be seen, but almost every public or private body with an interest in the long-term health of the population seems to be on board. So are some, but not all, of the residents.

Elizabeth Shassere, Stockton’s director of public health, says it is imperative to move beyond the excuses for poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle. Pockets of significant social deprivation? Yes, but Stockton has fewer than many of its neighbouring boroughs. What about the majority, even in the poorest communities, who manage to stay fit and healthy? And affluent families who struggle with their weight? Ignorance of a sensible diet? Educate them. Nowhere to exercise? Provide it. Specialist help for the clinically obese? Provide that, too. Can’t afford to use the leisure centre? Give the children free admission. It is a whole-life approach that begins with ante-natal visits by midwives.

Advice is offered on nutrition and cookery, physical activity programmes for pregnant women and the importance of breastfeeding, which, at 54 per cent, is below the national average in Stockton. Young women are also encouraged to join Fit to Push, a programme of organised walks for mothers with prams and buggies. School initiatives include Clean Your Plate. Stickers are awarded for a clean plate at the end of every meal and the pupil with the most stickers wins a prize. Evidence shows this has reduced portion sizes. There are healthy workplace programmes, free leisure facilities for 7,400 children and Sporting Start, which gives children aged from 3 to 16 a free introduction to activities including gymnastics, badminton and street dancing.

In the past two years 8,150 pedometers have also been issued to Stockton residents in the hope that a third of the borough’s 189,000 population will be walking 10,000 steps daily by 2010. Attempts are being made to curb the proliferation of fast-food outlets, improve the physical environment and cycling routes and create more safe areas for children to play outside.There are even “walking school buses”, in which children are led by adults on walks to and from school.

It all sounds admirable. The reality, on a sun-dappled afternoon this week in the old railway town from which Harold MacMillan took his title, was not quite so inspirational — though there were some true believers. Young mothers Jill Herbert and Tracey Watson emerged from the Splash Centre, where their children had enjoyed a free swimming session, to evangelise about diet and exercise. Nathan, 4, eats a lot of fruit, fish and pasta, while three-year-old Isabelle loves “all sorts of vegetables, even broccoli and cauliflower”.

Enter the Castlegate shopping centre and the picture changes. Here is the world of the budget shopper: Pound World, More4Less, Poundland and Home Bargains. Les Meynell, who runs a family butcher’s shop and delicatessen, says that his business has survived, while rivals have been forced to close, by selling hot, rich, juicy pre-cooked meat and poultry, which vastly outsells his raw, fresh products.

“It’s all changed. The young ’uns don’t want to go home and cook fresh joints. They can manage a pan of chips and that’s about it. People want their meat already cooked and that’s what’s kept us afloat,” he said. Mr Meynell was visited by a well-meaning health official, who encouraged him to use low-fat mayonnaise in his sandwiches. He tried it for a week and gave up. “The regulars came back and asked us what the hell we were doing? They said the low-fat sandwiches were tasteless, and they were right. Ask most of my customers and no one gives a stuff about healthy eating, except well-to-do people who want to look after their figure. They buy a salad sandwich, we charge them the earth for it and they go away happy.”

Warming to his theme, Mr Meynell confided Stockton’s best-kept secret. A company well known nationally for its pork pies often turns to butchers such as Mr Meynell to offload bulk deliveries deemed surplus to supermarket requirements. “I can sell £1,000-worth of pork pies in my shop every week. The supplier told me that in Newcastle they can’t sell them for any money. Nowhere else in the North East eats pork pies like we do in Stockton,” he said.

Around the corner, Brian Peacock, a greengrocer, says many young people do not even recognise many of the vegetables he sells. “It’s only older people who buy the veg. And the students. As for the rest of them, they don’t know what half of them are called, let alone how to cook or eat them.” Stockton’s target is to cut child obesity rates back to their 2000 level by 2020. If the council and health authorities fail to deliver, it will not be for want of trying.

SOURCE

2009-07-11T00:29:00.001+11:30

Taking a stand against the hyper-regulation of British life

When everything from looking after kids to dancing in pubs requires a licence, Josie Appleton suggests a summer rebellion against regulation

There is no doubt that, over the past few years, there has been a fundamental shift in the relationship between state and civil society in Britain. But this shift has a peculiar quality. It is not that the state is oppressing society, or remoulding society in line with a political ideology. There are no New Labour boot camps; no smashing of newspapers that criticise the government.

The peculiar quality to state intervention was suggested by a letter I received recently, from my local National Health Service (NHS) trust. The letter announced a new NHS Camden initiative called ‘Walking Maps’, which ‘encourages local people to lead a healthier lifestyle by incorporating walking into their schedules’. The trust had mapped five walks around the borough of Camden in London, and invited me to come to the launch – where I could try one of the walks, and also ‘get lifestyle advice from our health trainers’ about healthy eating and so on.

It is not so much that the state is remoulding civil society. Instead, the state is demanding that we live our everyday lives through it. We are invited for a walk with the state; we are invited to eat with the state. More and more of social life is now lived through the state as an intermediary. Our everyday actions are supervised – and authorised – by an official bureaucracy.

The emblem of this peculiar situation is the licence. Obviously in pubs, you need a licence to sell alcohol. Now, however, you also need a licence for just about every other activity you might want to perform inside a pub. You need a sporting license to play darts. If somebody wants to watch the darts, you need a sporting events licence. There is a licence for dancing, which can be strictly enforced: undercover council officials spotted people ‘swaying’ in a bar in Westminster and chastised the owners. There is a licence to play music. There is even a ‘spoken word’ license, to cover poetry readings and plays.

The Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check, where all adults who work with children must first submit to an analysis of their pasts, is in effect a safe-adult licence – and if you don’t have it you shouldn’t go anywhere near children who are not your own, we are told. There is a licence to protest. In some areas you need a licence to hand out political leaflets, or to take photographs.

The meaning of the licence is, in effect, that you need the state’s permission to live. Your life is licensed. You can only dance, protest, photograph, volunteer and so on if you have the correct card.

Unlicensed social life is declared dirty and dangerous. If you don’t have the CRB check, you are a potential paedophile. If you don’t have an ID card, you are not a legitimate citizen (though the UK government has recently announced that ID cards probably won’t be compulsory). If you don’t have your photography licence, you are probably a terrorist taking pictures of public buildings in order to destroy those buildings at a later date.

Everyone who is not on a database, or who does not have a card to account for their actions, is illegitimate at best, and dangerous or tainted at worst. The state puts itself in the position of constituting civil society – not, however, by remoulding it, but merely by requiring that everyday life is authorised. It becomes the mass issuer of permission slips – permission to dance, sing, or read poetry. The state doesn’t so much ban activities as request that we ask it for its permission first.

We are seeing the bureaucratisation of everyday life. The methods of bureaucracy – which would have occurred in only very specific spheres in the past – now become part of every sphere.

There is a code or policy for the simplest situations. The English Golf Association has a ‘late-pick-up’ policy, which is a policy to deal with the situation of parents picking up their kids late after golf practice. The volunteer should wait with the child – categorically not give the child a lift home! – preferably with another adult, and in open view. If the parents cannot be contacted, the volunteer should consider calling the police for advice. Getting a child to and from sports practice now comes with an instruction manual.

Public space has been divided into zones: home zone, no-booze zone, low-emission zone, and so on. Although this is bureaucracy-speak, so it is not always clear what a particular zone means, and what implications it has for your behaviour. In a café in Elephant and Castle in London, I saw a sign saying that this was part of an ‘Age Check Zone’.

You could say: it’s only a drink in the park, it’s only the local nursery, it’s only a game of darts in the pub – who cares if there are licences and checks? These are not suitably dramatic freedom issues: these are not about police beatings, or smashing printing presses, or banning political organisations.

But I would turn this around and say: if we can’t even have a drink in the park, how can we have a demonstration? If we need permission to help out at our child’s nursery, how can we change the government? If social life is licensed at its every step, then we cannot be citizens or subjects in any other respect.

The Manifesto Club campaigns on we what call ‘flashpoint freedom issues’. These are the points at which there is a conflict between state regulation and people’s aspirations, desires or sense of their own autonomy. These are the points where the silent process of state regulation can be revealed, made conscious, and protested against.

Our campaigns – including our campaigns against vetting, or against booze bans – have laid the groundwork for this. Our Freedom Summer events series takes this project further, around the rallying cry: social life should not be licensed!

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Abusive teen causes well-liked teacher to snap in British school

A 14-YEAR-OLD student is in hospital with serious head injuries after a teacher allegedly attacked him in the middle of a lesson as shocked classmates looked on. Jack Waterhouse, 14, was taken to hospital after the incident in a classroom at All Saints' Roman Catholic School in Mansfield, England on Wednesday. Science teacher Peter Harvey, 49, has been arrested on suspicion of attempting to murder the boy and assaulting two other children, police have said. The Sun reported the boy was found in a pool of blood. Police said a weapon was used in the attack and the whole class had been "traumatised" by what they had seen. The Guardian website reported a weight from a set of scales was believed to have been used.

The Daily Mail reported Mr Harvey, a father of two, allegedly snapped after the boy swore at him.

Police said there were initial grave concerns about the boy's condition but he was now said to be stable, although still serious. "I can say that, allegedly as part of the incident, a weapon was used against the child. We are investigating exactly what did happen," Detective Superintendent Adrian Pearson said. "Obviously the whole class is traumatised by what has happened."

The other two children - a boy and a girl - who were allegedly assaulted did not need hospital treatment, he said. "The school have been working very closely with us to cooperate and to gain the full assistance of the children who were witnesses to what took place," Det Supt Pearson said.

Local news site Mansfield Chad reported that the boy's family was at his bedside in hospital. It quoted a parent as saying his son had been in the lesson. "You don't expect something like that to happen in a school," he said. "My son phoned me to tell me what happened and said all the kids in the lesson were just in shock." The school has offered counselling to students.

Other media reports said former pupils and parents had expressed surprise that the teacher, who taught science, was the one suspected of being involved. "I didn't think the pupils would give him stick," ex-pupil Tom Blythe, 19, was quoted as saying. "He was actually a decent bloke and got involved in school plays." On its website, the school said it had been a Performing Arts College since 2002 and had been described as "rapidly improving" in a 2009 Ofsted inspection. "All Saints' School is a lively, Catholic comprehensive school with a very special, warm ethos which is recognised by all who visit," the headteacher said on the website.

Det Supt Pearson said the incident was out of character for the school. "It's a school where people send their children from a wide catchment area. There have been no similar incidents before," he said.

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When public health becomes a public nuisance

The bizarre advice given to British doctors on how to deal with swine flu confirms that top-down scaremongering is destroying medical practice

The combination of speculative scaremongering by Britain’s health authorities and increasingly absurd directives to general practitioner (GP) surgeries in response to the current flu outbreak confirms that public health has become a public nuisance.

On 3 July, the UK health minister Andy Burnham (the fourth since the last General Election) announced that the swine flu pandemic could no longer be contained and that there could be 100,000 cases a day by the end of August. In response to the suggestion from a TV interviewer that this could mean 40 deaths a day, the chief medical officer Liam Donaldson agreed that this was possible, and that it could be higher.

Burnham conceded that his figure was ‘a projection’, not a fact - he meant that it was a speculation based largely on ignorance, similar to previous (unfulfilled) predictions of catastrophic mortality from AIDS, mad cow disease and bird flu. Though leading public health authorities cling to the belief that proclaiming nightmare scenarios is useful in raising public awareness of disease, in reality this provokes anxiety out of all proportion to benefit.

On the same day we received in our GP surgery, by fax and email (and no doubt shortly also by post), the latest of the almost daily pandemic flu briefings from the local primary care trust (PCT). The headline barks: ‘PPE procedures to be used for every patient.’ The bulletin continues in the now familiar tone of an exasperated infant school teacher spelling things out for children who suffer from a combination of learning difficulties and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (though it never goes so far as to explain that PPE stands for ‘personal protective equipment’):

‘GPs are reminded that on seeing a patient with flu-like symptoms they need to follow all guidance on PPE, including wearing a surgical mask, gloves and apron.’

This is the sort of advice that could only be given by somebody who has never set foot in a GP surgery, certainly not since the onset of the great swine flu scare. The simple fact is that many patients who have been alarmed by the pandemic propaganda take no notice of the advice to stay at home and come to the surgery (and bring their children) and - quite understandably - expect to be seen. So, after they have sat in the waiting room for hours, coughing and spluttering, we are then expected to scrub and gown up as though we were performing open-heart surgery - and then repeat this procedure for the 20 other patients in the queue? Dream on.

I am torn over what has been the most useful guidance we have received from on high. Is it the diagram showing a cross-section of the nasopharynx illustrating how to take a throat swab? Or is it the picture of the container showing how to package the swab for transport to the laboratory? It was also very helpful to receive ‘real examples’ of ‘what not to do’ detailing just how stupid some local GPs have been in misinterpreting simple guidelines. It is shocking to hear that some GPs have even confused World Health Organisation (WHO) pandemic alert algorithm S5a (for dealing with suspected cases) with algorithm S5b (for sporadic cases). Is it any wonder that the pandemic is out of control? Can revalidation come a moment too soon?

GPs who were instructed - as I was - by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) to visit a suspected case of swine flu solely to do a throat swab may be alarmed by the proposals for home visiting in the grand pandemic flu contingency plan. This anticipates that 28.5 per cent (note the decimal place precision) of a predicted 30million cases in the UK (based on a 50 per cent ‘clinical attack rate’) will require visiting at home. By my humble calculations, assuming a four-week period (and assuming, improbably, no GP absenteeism), this would mean about 10 visits a day for every GP working seven days a week. Whether or not this would be of any benefit to these patients, it would certainly bring primary care services to a halt. But, if the epidemiologists want swabs, why not ask patients to do their own? (They could be sent pictures to help them locate their noses and throats.) We do this already with suspected cases of measles and mumps, so why not for flu? Patients are quite capable of doing their own genital swabs for chlamydia. Indeed this suggests another role for the ‘flu friend’: why not ask them to do your chlamydia swabs as well and get even friendlier?

The unfolding swine flu fiasco raises some hypothetical questions. What if the WHO, the HPA, the Department of Health and the rest had declared an embargo on press conferences and public statements? What if they had encouraged the virologists to concentrate their energies in the laboratories (where their achievements have been impressive) and stay away from the TV studios (where their pronouncements have often been ill-judged and alarmist)?

What if the PCTs had simply let GPs respond in the familiar way to cases of flu apparently occurring in an unfamiliar season? Given the evident mildness of the vast majority of swine flu cases (often milder than seasonal flu), it is difficult to believe that this approach would have resulted in any higher morbidity or mortality. It would certainly have led to less anxiety, to a much lower number of confirmed cases and to a vastly lower consumption of marginally effective anti-viral drugs. It would also have prevented much distress to patients, and much disruption to schools and workplaces (not to mention to surgeries, out-of-hours services, and hospitals).

Ah yes, but it could have been worse, comes the doomsday chorus from WHO, HPA, and all the rest. No doubt, the H1N1 virus could mutate to become the most virulent strain since the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 20million people. It could even be worse than the Black Death of 1348 that reduced the population of Europe by a third. Or maybe not. The public health authorities appear to have become incapable of distinguishing between sensible contingency planning and scaremongering propaganda. But instead of quietly admitting at the outset that very little was known about H1N1 and discreetly getting on with the job of preparing a vaccine and testing drugs, they reached for the megaphone. Better, according to the official mantra of twenty-first century risk aversion, ‘to prepare for the worst and hope for the best’. But even if swine flu had turned out to be a more serious illness, it is difficult to see how scaremongering, swabbing, PPE and Tamiflu would have made much difference.

The ascendancy of public health over primary care revealed in the swine flu scare is an ominous trend. The statements of both national and local public health practitioners confirm attitudes of condescension, even contempt, for the individuals traditionally regarded as being at the centre of primary care - patients and GPs. For public health specialists, our patients are merely people committed to unhealthy lifestyles. Their risk factor epidemiology repackages old prejudices: people get ill because they are idle, promiscuous, gluttonous, drunken, and as the spread of swine flu confirms, dirty. They regard GPs as sadly lacking in the moral fervour required to transform the deviant behaviour of our patients.

The outlook of public health would not be of much consequence were it not for the fact that it has, over the past 20 years, acquired a growing influence over primary health care. This is confirmed by the prominent role of public health specialists, who often have little knowledge or experience of General Practice, in primary care trusts. It is also reflected in the shift in the focus of primary care away from the diagnosis and treatment of the illnesses presented by patients towards the attempt to manage the health-related behaviour of the practice population. The burgeoning activities of check-ups and screening are resulting in what might be called an epidemic (perhaps not yet a pandemic) of overdiagnosis and overtreatment particularly in relation to cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

The moralising propaganda of public health has a generally demoralising effect on society, encouraging fear and anxiety - and attendant sentiments of stigma and blame. It has a degrading effect on medical practice and is corrosive of good relations between doctors and their patients. As the swine flu scare confirms, it is also disruptive of day-to-day medical practice.

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British "reforms" see pupils reject school food

The number of children having school meals has stalled after the increase in nutritional standards pioneered by Jamie Oliver, official figures show today. Only a third of secondary age pupils eat a cooked lunch. Participation has decreased ever since the standard of food rose after Oliver’s School Dinners campaign in 2005 which resulted in the banning of Turkey Twizzlers and daily helpings of chips.

The School Food Trust, a government agency responsible for improving the quality and take-up of school meals, claimed a victory because the figures rose marginally when comparing schools that had used exactly the same method of calculation last year. But the figures are an embarrassment for the Government, which pledged three years ago to achieve an increase of 10 percentage points in the number of children eating school meals, by this autumn — a target that has been missed whichever set of data is used.

The School Food Trust claimed this year’s was the first “statistically robust national survey” of school meal take-up, but did not say in previous years that the figures were unreliable. When comparing schools that had collected the figures in the same way year-on-year, it said the number of children eating school meals had risen by 0.1 per cent, from 43.8 per cent to 43.9 per cent at primary level, and from 35.5 per cent to 36 per cent in secondary schools.

But figures from all local authorities that responded show the overall national figures were 39.3 per cent in primary schools, compared with 43.6 per cent last year, and 35.1 per cent at secondary level, compared with 37.2 per cent in 2008. The School Food Trust said that this year's figures had been collected in a different way, so that the years could not be compared.

The Local Authority Caterers’ Association(LACA) described the increase as “marginal”. Neil Porter, its chairman, said: “We recognise that this year we are using a different way to calculate the data on the take-up of school lunches. LACA is encouraged by the apparent marginal upward trend in meal take-up in both primary and secondary schools. “However, we believe that we are on a longer journey when it comes to secondary school students. Increasing secondary meal take-up will continue to be a challenge for all of us.”

It was at a secondary school in South Yorkshire that mothers of pupils took orders from the local fast food shop for pupils at lunchtime, after children refused to eat the new healthy school meals. They were seen pushing burgers, fish and chips through the school gates.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Shadow Schools Secretary, said the figures showed a “massive drop” in the number of children eating school meals, and had missed its target to increase participation by “well over one million children”. He added: “We now know that barely a third of secondary school pupils are eating school meals. “There are a number of reasons why the Government has missed its target — including the rushed introduction of new food standards before the groundwork had been done to ensure children will eat the new healthier option.

“The Government stands little chance in meeting its targets unless there is both more investment in the school meals service and a massive change in expectations, so that sitting down for a proper lunch once again becomes the norm for every child.”

Prue Leith, chairwoman of the School Food Trust, said: “We now have a genuine picture of take-up across the country and we can see that real progress is being made the length and breadth of England. “I am heartened that take-up has increased slightly in primary schools following the introduction of new nutrient-based standards and am convinced we are winning the battle for the hearts, minds and tastebuds of children and parents. “It is particularly pleasing that secondary schools have turned the corner. This has always been a long-term project.”

Diana Johnson, the Schools Minister, said: “Four years ago, the majority of children were eating unhealthy meals at school. Chips, chocolate and sugar-filled fizzy drinks were available everyday as a choice for school lunch. Today there is no school where this can now happen — all schools must provide a portion of vegetable and fruit as part of a nutritionally balanced main meal. Now millions of children across the country are eating healthy school lunches. “We know that it is often the state of dining facilities and poor organisation, not nutritional changes that put children off schools dinners. That is why we have invested significant funds in improving dining facilities and the School Food Trust is supporting schools to improve the way they organise their meals services.”

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UK: BNP Leader says “sink immigrants’ boats”

The EU should sink boats carrying illegal immigrants to prevent them entering Europe, British National Party leader Nick Griffin has told the BBC. The MEP for the North-West of England said the EU had to get "very tough" with migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Pressed on what should happen to those on board, he said: "Throw them a life raft and they can go back to Libya". Libya has long been a staging post for migrants from Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa wanting to reach Europe.

Nearly 37,000 immigrants landed on Italian shores last year, an increase of about 75% on the year before. But with the prospect of a new immigration and asylum policy being voted on this autumn by MEPs, Mr Griffin is advocating measures to destroy boats used by illegal immigrants to reach the EU's southern coastline.

In an interview with this week's edition of BBC Parliament's The Record Europe, he said: "If there's measures to set up some kind of force or to help, say the Italians, set up a force which actually blocks the Mediterranean then we'd support that. Europe has sooner or later to close its borders or its simply going to be swamped by the Third World

"But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying on the way to get over here is to get very tough with those coming over. "Frankly, they need to sink several of those boats. "Anyone coming up with measures like that we'll support but anything which is there as a 'oh, we need to do something about it' but in the end doing something about it means bringing them into Europe' we will oppose."

The interviewer, BBC Correspondent Shirin Wheeler, said: "I don't think the EU is in the business of murdering people at sea." Mr Griffin replied: "I didn't say anyone should be murdered at sea - I say boats should be sunk, they can throw them a life raft and they can go back to Libya. "But Europe has sooner or later to close its borders or its simply going to be swamped by the Third World."

In May, the Italian government gave Libya three patrol boats as part of a deal aimed at combating the flow of illegal migrants making the crossing to Italy. Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a member of the anti-immigration Lega Nord party, hailed the first 200 migrants picked up by the boats and returned to Libya as an "historic" moment.

But human rights groups have raised concerns about Italy sending migrants back to Libya without first screening them for asylum claims or to discover whether they are sick, injured, unaccompanied children or victims of human trafficking. Libya has no functioning asylum system and is not a party to the 1951 UN convention relating to the status of refugees.

Separately Mr Griffin, who will next week formally take up his seat in Brussels, has admitted that the BNP has failed to convince other like-minded parties to form an alliance in the new European Parliament. Talks with France's Front National, Lega Nord, and other groups fell apart, with Lega Nord now joining the new Europe of Freedom and Democracy group, led by Britain's UK Independence Party.

Mr Griffin told The Parliament.com: "We needed at least 25 members from seven different member states to form a group. There is no doubt that we would have been able to wield a lot more influence if we could have formed a group. "No one was prepared to commit themselves knowing that we had not got Lega Nord on board. "Even so, we will continue to work together with these other groups and share ideas. We will have less access to things like speaking time and committee votes but it's too bad."

The BNP advocates British withdrawal from the European Union and an end to all immigration to the UK and last month won its first two seats in the European Parliament. Mr Griffin and the party's other recently-elected MEP Andrew Brons will sit in the "non-attached" section of the Parliament, which means they will be entitled to less administrative and financial support.

You can watch the full interview with Nick Griffin on The Record Europe on BBC Parliament, BBC World and the BBC News Channel

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British Labour isn’t working : "The latest figures released by the Department of Work and Pensions show a telling but frightening story as to the societal damage New Labour have inflicted upon Britain. According to the data, over a million people have been on constant state benefits since 1997 whilst another 1.9 million have been on benefits for over seven years. These results are not as surprising once New Labour’s welfare policies have been inspected. Although they claim to support the most vulnerable in society they seem to have penalised them at every opportunity. State benefits are set at a level where it is more beneficial for an individual to remain on them rather than seek employment.”

2009-07-10T00:04:00.000+11:30

British Greenie academics say it's time to ditch "cap and trade" climate policies

Just when everyone has decided that "cap and trade" is the holy grail! What a nasty spanner in the works!

An international group of academics is urging world leaders to abandon their current policies on climate change. The authors of How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course say the strategy based on overall emissions cuts has failed and will continue to fail. They want G8 nations and emerging economies to focus on an approach based on improving energy efficiency and decarbonising energy supply. Critics of the report's recommendations say they are a dangerous diversion.

The report is published by the London School of Economics' (LSE) Mackinder Programme and the University of Oxford's Institute for Science, Innovation & Society. LSE Mackinder programme director Gwyn Prins said the current system of attempting to cap carbon emissions then allow trading in emissions permits had led to emissions continuing to rise. He said world proposals to expand carbon trading schemes and channel billions of dollars into clean energy technologies would not work. "The world has been recarbonising, not decarbonising," Professor Prins said.

"The evidence is that the Kyoto Protocol and its underlying approach have had and are having no meaningful effect whatsoever. "Worthwhile policy builds upon what we know works and upon what is feasible rather than trying to deploy never-before implemented policies through complex institutions requiring a hitherto unprecedented and never achieved degree of global political alignment."

The report has drawn an angry response from some environmentalists, who acknowledge the problems it highlights but fear that the solutions it proposes will not work. Tom Burke, from Imperial College London and a former government adviser, said: "The authors are right to be concerned about the lack of urgency in the political response to climate change. "They are also right to identify significant weaknesses in the major policy instrument currently being negotiated. "But nothing could be more harmful than to propose that the world stop what it is doing on climate change and start again working in a different way," Professor Burke contested.

"This is neither practical nor analytically defensible - and it seems to have been born more out of frustration than understanding of the nature of the political processes involved. "This is a far more complex, and urgent, diplomatic task than the strategic arms control negotiations and will require an even more sophisticated and multi-channel approach to its solution. Stop-go is not sophisticated."

G8 leaders will discuss climate change on Wednesday before joining leaders of emerging economies on Thursday for a meeting chaired by President Obama.

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EVEN THE BBC CLIMATE BLOG QUESTIONS 'SHRINKING SHEEP' HYPE

Wild sheep on a remote Scottish island are shrinking, and new research suggests that they're global warming's latest warning. But is climate change really to blame for the dip in this mouton célébré's size?

According to Tim Coulson and colleagues at Imperial College London, Soay sheep on the Outer Hebridean island of Hirta shrank by two kilos over the 25-year long study. And it's not because they've discovered the Atkins diet: Professor Coulson says that climate change is shortening Europe's harsh winters, allowing the puny sheep that would normally perish in the cold to survive. 'The Soay sheep provides another example of how far-reaching and unpredictable the effects of climate change can be', he remarks in the Times.

While there's no doubt that Europe's winters have become markedly warmer since the '70s, allowing the sheep to shrink, not all scientists are as sure as Professor Coulson that climate change is pulling the strings. This 2007 study by Dr Anastasios Tsonis, for example, points the finger at natural variability rather than greenhouse gas emissions. The North Atlantic Oscillation, the northern hemisphere's weather-maker, has simply been stuck in 'positive' (a.k.a. winter-warming) mode since the 1970s, he suggests.

'The standard explanation for the post 1970s warming is that the radiative effect of greenhouse gases overcame shortwave reflection effects due to aerosols', notes Dr Tsonis. 'However [our models suggest] an alternative hypothesis, namely that the climate shifted after the 1970s event to a different state of a warmer climate, which may be superimposed on an anthropogenic warming trend', he concludes.

So: William Blake's 'Little Lamb' can still thank the mild and the meek for its existence - but not necessarily climate change.

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Warmist critic of vituperative gibberish engages in vituperative gibberish

Below are some comments from the original moonbat himself. He accuses climate skeptics of vituperative gibberish. But what is his article if it is not vituperative? I can see no mention of any single scientific fact in it. It is all abuse: "native idiocy", "infantile blathering" etc. And, as for "gibberish", his paranoid ravings that his critics are "astroturfers" (i.e. in the pay of "big oil" and the like) ignores all the eminent retired and tenured climate scientists (Singer, Lindzen, Kininmonth etc.) who need no pay from anyone to point out that global warming stopped more than 10 years ago. And paranoia is a type of madness, madness that often produces "gibberish" such as Monbiot's

On the Guardian's environment site in particular, and to a lesser extent on threads across the Guardian's output, considered discussion is being drowned in a tide of vituperative gibberish. A few hundred commenters appear to be engaged in a competition to reach the outer limits of stupidity. They post so often and shout so loudly that intelligent debate appears to have fled from many threads, as other posters have simply given up in disgust. I've now reached the point at which I can't be bothered to read beyond the first page or so of comments. It is simply too depressing.

The pattern, where environmental issues are concerned, is always the same. You can raise any issue you like, introduce a dossier of new information, deploy a novel argument, drop a shocking revelation. The comments which follow appear almost to have been pre-written. Whether or not you mentioned it, large numbers will concentrate on climate change – or rather on denying its existence. Another tranche will concentrate on attacking the parentage and lifestyle of the author. Very few address the substance of the article.

I believe that much of this is native idiocy: the infantile blathering of people who have no idea how to engage in debate. Many of the posters appear to have fallen for the nonsense produced by professional climate change deniers, and to have adopted their rhetoric and methods. But it is implausible to suppose that this is all that's going on. As I documented extensively in my book Heat, and as sites like DeSmogBlog and Exxonsecrets show, there is a large and well-funded campaign by oil, coal and electricity companies to insert their views into the media.

They have two main modes of operating: paying people to masquerade as independent experts, and paying people to masquerade as members of the public. These fake "concerned citizens" claim to be worried about a conspiracy by governments and scientists to raise taxes and restrict their freedoms in the name of tackling a non-existent issue. This tactic is called astroturfing. It's a well-trodden technique, also deployed extensively by the tobacco industry. You pay a public relations company to create a fake grassroots (astroturf) movement, composed of people who are paid for their services. They lobby against government attempts to regulate the industry and seek to drown out and discredit people who draw attention to the issues the corporations want the public to ignore.

Considering the lengths to which these companies have gone to insert themselves into publications where there is a risk of exposure, it is inconceivable that they are not making use of the Guardian's threads, where they are protected by the posters' anonymity. Some of the commenters on these threads have been paid to disseminate their nonsense, but we have no means, under the current system, of knowing which ones they are.

Two months ago I read some comments by a person using the moniker scunnered52, whose tone and content reminded me of material published by professional deniers. I called him out, asking "Is my suspicion correct? How about providing a verifiable identity to lay this concern to rest?" I repeated my challenge in another thread. He used distraction and avoidance in his replies, but would not answer or even address my question, which gave me the strong impression that my suspicion was correct.

So what should we do to prevent these threads from becoming the plaything of undisclosed corporate interests? My view is that everyone should be free to say whatever they want. I have never asked for a comment to be removed, nor will I do so. I believe that the threads should be unmoderated, except to protect the Guardian from Britain's ridiculous libel laws. But I also believe that everyone who comments here should be accountable: in other words that the rest of us should be able to see who they are. By hiding behind pseudonyms, commenters here are exposed to no danger of damaging their reputations by spouting nonsense. Astroturfers can adopt any number of identities, perhaps posting under different names in the same thread. We have no idea whether we are reading genuine views or corporate propaganda. There is also an asymmetry here: you know who I am; in fact some people on these threads seem to know more about me than I do. But I have no idea who I am arguing with.

Some people object that verifiable identities could expose posters to the risk of being traced and attacked. This is nonsense. I make no secret of my whereabouts and attract more controversy than almost anyone on these pages, but I have never felt at risk, even when, during the first few months of the Iraq war, I received emails threatening to kill, torture and mutilate me almost every day. For all the huffing and puffing in cyberspace, people simply don't care enough to take it into the real world.

So how could it best be done? Amazon prevents people from reviewing their own work by taking credit card numbers from anyone who wants to post. Is this the right way to go, or is there a better way of doing it? What do you think?

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Britain releases criminal illegal immigrants

Ministers were plunged deeper into scandal last night as it emerged almost 200 of the dangerous criminals who are wrongly at large are foreign nationals. Incredibly, a third of the convicts were released from jail on licence despite being told they were liable for deportation. Facing removal from Britain, the men - who include a rapist - went on the run. Critics said it 'beggared belief' that ministers had been prepared to release on to the streets criminals who should have been booted out of the country.

The revelations followed the announcement on Monday that 954 criminals who were released early had been recalled to jail for breaching their licence requirements, but had never been tracked down by police. The Government made no mention of the nationality of the convicts, who include murderers, rapists and paedophiles. But the Daily Mail has discovered that 192 of the 954 are classed as foreign nationals.

Some 64 had committed crimes which were so serious they should have been deported at the end of their sentence. But instead of being held in detention until they could be kicked out, they were allowed to walk free on licence instead.

The scandal for the Home Office now moves significantly closer to the foreign prisoner fiasco, which claimed the scalp of Charles Clarke in 2006. In that year, it emerged that 1,000 overseas inmates were freed without even being considered for deportation. Last night, Tory home affairs spokesman Chris Grayling said: 'This is fast turning into a major scandal. 'The failure to deport foreign criminals after they are released from jail has already cost the job of one Home Secretary, people simply will not understand why ministers have failed to get to grips with this problem.'

Critics said inmates were now being assessed for removal, but this did little good if they were being allowed to walk free.

The Mail reported yesterday how an urgent police manhunt was under way to trace the 954 criminals wrongly at large. They include 20 murderers, 15 rapists and five paedophiles. At least 59 have reoffended, including crimes of rape. One murderer has been on the run for 25 years, and is understood to have escaped abroad, and is living in mainland Europe.

The Government knew little or nothing of the fiasco until after a review of the recall process was ordered two years ago. The findings were made available on Monday, in a statement to Parliament. Criminals freed early on licence can be sent back to jail if they reoffend, or breach the terms of their early release.

Lin Homer, chief executive of the UK Border Agency, said: 'The system for dealing with the consideration and removal of foreign national prisoners has been made more and more secure, with every individual considered before the end of their sentence. 'Any foreign criminal serving more than 12 months in prison is automatically considered for deportation - last year we sent home a record 5,400 lawbreakers. 'We are working closely with the police and probation service to assist in returning to prison those foreign national prisoners who have broken their licence conditions.'

Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said: 'The Home Office may have been split in two since the last foreign prisoners scandal but it seems the lessons still haven't been learned.'

At least two police forces have refused to publish the names and pictures of local criminals who had absconded. But last night, the the Information Commissioner's Office said data protection rules should not stop them releasing such details.

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How many more teen pregnancies before the British Left admits its sex education has been a disaster?

A £5m programme to reduce teenage pregnancies has failed spectacularly. And so we now have a Leftist arguing for moral education

How many more teen pregnancies will it take before this Government realises what a catastrophic failure its sex education policies have been? That is a question I never thought I would find myself asking. I write as a mother of a teenage daughter and a left-of-centre commentator with an unshakeable belief in the power of education to transform lives. I am - and continue to be - a defender of the rights of women and girls, including their right to an abortion, when needed. There is no U-turn here, no betrayal of what I have always believed in. But the facts can no longer be ignored.

The time has come for an honest reflection on teenage pregnancy rates, a social ill which policy-makers and politicians do not seem capable of tackling. We have just had one more example of this failure. An evaluation of one of many government sex education initiatives (this one named YPDP, the Young People's Development Programme) has just been published in the respected British Medical Journal. This programme, costing more than £5million, focussed on groups of sexually active young girls who were considered most at risk of getting pregnant. The girls were given intensive health education and free condoms in the hope that this would enable them to avoid unprotected sex.

Apparently, similar projects in New York had effectively cut down the number of teen mums. Not so here. Alarmingly, significantly more girls on the course got pregnant than those not on the programme. In other words, the costly scheme achieved the very opposite of what it had set out to do. By any reckoning, it is a monumental failure. Yet I predict that all those on the Left will yet again insist that only more sex education will help free these young women. They will insist that only this can free them from the fate that otherwise awaits them, repeating the cycle of teen parenthood through future generations.

But how can this be right? It makes no sense to me at all, repeating a prescription that is manifestly failing. It is just like a patient who has a terrible headache. You give him or her a supposed painkiller. The pain goes on, so you give them another dose of the exact same medicine. Still the pain continues, so you give them two more and then a specially strong one, refusing to accept the evidence in front of your eyes that the treatment is simply not working, and that if carried on, the treatment will cause a cumulative harm that will probably make the sickness dangerously worse.

Yet that's how the Government has responded to Britain's shamefully high teen pregnancy rates - giving them even more sex education, at a younger and younger age. Although I have no objection to basic sex education in schools, that alone seems unable to prevent teenage pregnancies and might actually be encouraging underage sexual activity. It is surely a mark of desperation when, as was recently announced, ministers plan to introduce sex education for children as young as five years old. Thereby you institutionalise the sexualisation of young children, incontrovertibly one of the main reasons for the alarming teen pregnancy statistics.

British children know enough already about sex; it shouts at them from billboards, whispers to them in magazines and newspapers, entices them on the internet and on TV, and consumes them in modern books for children, too. The problem is that this sexual awareness is received and ingested but with no guidance on consequences, nor any cautionary social mores. And although teenage pregnancies most affect those on low incomes, the valueless universe is affecting all our children.

I have tried to teach my own daughter what I think she needs to survive this culture, but that might not be enough. Like so many others, I can only hope and pray she will pass through the next years without succumbing. I see a number of the girls she went to primary school with, out on the streets, dressed provocatively, smoking and inviting attention. It is both scary and distressing to witness. Not so very long ago, these same children came to birthday parties and sang songs at our house. What the devil got into them?

They would all get full marks if tested on the technical aspects of sex. But they have not learnt how to resist the destructive imperatives of the habitat they live in.

For an old feminist like me, the gains we made were many, but we have failed to equip young females with the tools they need to withstand the pressures put on them to give in to (or seek) sexual activity before they are mature enough to understand the implications.

I have a Danish friend whose partner is English. They have three daughters and he is fighting hard to move to his home country, which, though sexually liberal, is still rooted in stable family traditions that, he says, save girls from early promiscuity. 'That family influence, that wisdom, is lost in England,' he says. And I fear he is right.

Don't get me wrong. I am not a prude, nor do I want the Fifties back again when sex was not discussed at all. There is a tragedy in my own family which hails from those days and continues to haunt us today. When she was only 16, a beloved relative of mine was sent to England to study. She was clueless when it came to sex. In Asian families nobody tells you anything - we don't even have words for intimate body parts or the sexual act. She came into an equally repressed England, got pregnant, had a child, but the shame of it brought on a progressive mental illness from which she will never recover.

What has replaced those buttoned-up, cruel times is serving our young no better. I spend a lot of time talking to families on a housing estate in West London. In the past year, four under-15s in one block alone have got pregnant and want to keep the children. Only one did her GCSEs. When I talked to them they were both nervous and full of bravado. None of the dads was interested. Selina was born to a teenage mum who couldn't remember how she had got into that state. Oh, they know how all the bits work, just not what sex can lead to, in the long term.

Boys behaving badly; girls behaving worse is becoming the norm in Britain. That will not change with free condoms and explicit family planning lessons. Too many young girls, still impressionable and forming into women, feel the need to pretend they are adults. We must find a way to teach them to wait until they mature enough to comprehend the consequences of their actions. We must encourage them to realise that you can have a boyfriend but not 'go all the way'. We must make it clear that virginity is not to be given away cheaply, something to throw at a frisky lad, but a precious rite of passage.

I would go further. I think teachers should be encouraged to provide moral guidance and warn kids of the consequences of children giving birth to children.

The masters of the TV universe who are criminally amoral, who have helped make this world, should be regulated. Teenage mums need to be recruited into education campaigns to tell others how hard it all is to bring up a child. It really is quite scandalous that the fourth richest nation in the world is still unable to find its moral centre and to prevent such levels of sexual incontinence and irresponsibility.

The education young people need is not about sex but about pregnancy, even more so about how to grow self respect. When, in a perverse reversal of traditional values, it becomes shameful for girls as young as 14 not to have had sex, as seems to be the case for too many in our country, then it is time for us all, from across the political and social spectrum, to wake up and do something radical. We simply cannot fall back on the tried and failed responses.

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British Justice Secretary promises another increase in media scrutiny of family courts

Long overdue. It might help rein in at least some of Britain's endemic abuses by social workers

Thousands of cases in the family courts will be exposed to increased public scrutiny under reforms to be announced today by Jack Straw. Restrictions on what the media can report are to be relaxed and expert witness reports containing details of child abuse allegations may be published. Mr Straw, the Justice Secretary, will also examine how, subject to safeguards, to allow media access to adoption cases. The reforms build on the opening up of the family courts in April after a campaign by fathers’ groups, politicians and the media led by The Times.

Despite this access, reporting is hampered by a confusing array of restrictions across at least ten statutes. Interviewed by The Times, Mr Straw said that there would be legislation in the next session of Parliament to overhaul the restrictions. In the meantime, the rules would be clarified by a committee headed by Sir Mark Potter, Britain’s most senior family judge, so that the media could report “the substance of children’s cases, while protecting the identity of parties and children”.

The opening of the family courts was marred by concerns that media access was hindered by reporting rules. At present, the Administration of Justice Act 1960 prohibits reporting of the substance of a family case unless a judge indicates otherwise.

Mr Straw said: “The first change was to allow the media into the courts and that came into force at the end of April. The second change relates to the concerns that have been expressed that although journalists can report the gist of proceedings they cannot report the substance without being in contempt of court.”

The changes will be considered next week and are likely to take effect this autumn. Legislation will then be introduced in the Improving Schools and Safeguarding Children’s Bill to rationalise reporting rules across all family courts in line with the regime that applies in the youth courts. Judges would have a discretion to lift anonymity provisions in the public interest at the end of a case. “All of this is turning around a tanker,” Mr Straw said. “But the tanker is turning.”

He added that he also wanted to look at opening up adoption proceedings, although judges strongly oppose media access, regarding adoption as a special case. “To some degree there is a special case and to some degree there isn’t,” Mr Straw said. He added: “What I want, without disclosing the identity of the parties or gratuitously disclosing family secrets where there is no public interest, is to see a light shone on these proceedings because I think that it is in the public interest for that to happen. There is no part of the judicial system that should be private. Confidence in the system suffers if proceedings entirely take place behind closed doors.”

He said, however, that there were “genuine concerns that can’t be dismissed” about protecting the identity of parties and about the disclosure of documents containing “sometimes lurid detail of family secrets”.

Despite a “high level of suspicion” about the media and journalists, Mr Straw said that they had shown themselves to be highly responsible when it came to abiding by reporting restrictions in the youth courts or in any other cases. The regime would be enforced through the contempt of court laws and he was confident that this would work. His family, he said, was subject to a family break-up when he was 10 and his siblings ranged in age from 3 months to 12 years. “If your children or my children were party to proceedings and some pretty unpleasant things were said, would you really want that stuff spilled out?” Mr Straw also delivered a broadside over the rising costs of family legal aid. Spending had risen from £550 million in 2004-05 to about £600 million in 2008-09 with no equivalent increase in the number of cases.

Mr Straw cited reforms to criminal trials and the cut in the number of adjournments. He questioned the need for large numbers of lawyers representing different parties in children’s cases. “A leading practitioner said to me, ‘Is it really in the interests of a child to have all these people in this room?’.”

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Another British exam-marking fiasco

Would you believe that some of the markers knew less than the grade-school kids they were assessing? In Britain, SATs are set during and at the end of grade school, usually at ages 11 and 14

Teachers expressed disgust over 'shocking' marking inconsistencies as SATs results arrived in schools yesterday. They claimed one in five grades could be inaccurate because of glitches in the system. They highlighted problems in vetting examiners and pressure to meet strict marking deadlines. Some pupils were marked down for correctly spelling 'distinctive', it emerged. The marker had written in the margin it should be 'destinctive'.

While 99.9 per cent of results were delivered on time, teachers besieged internet forums with complaints of 'unbelievable' marking errors. The revelation raised the prospect of thousands of scripts once again being sent back for remarking. Almost 40,000 results had to be changed last year, in the wake of an administrative fiasco that led to delayed marks for 1.2million pupils. The year before, fewer than 10,000 grades were changed.

Rachel Ross, head of Woolton Hill Junior School, in Newbury, Berkshire, said: 'There are lots of errors. We feel somebody has rushed.'

Teachers' concerns mainly centre around results in the writing test. One told the Times Educational Supplement online forum they had 'watertight evidence of incompetent marking' after comparing pupils' scripts with the marks awarded. Another said a pupil who is brilliant at creative writing was given the same marks as a classmate who cannot write in sentences. A third said a piece of writing that had impressed an A-level examiner was awarded level three - lower than the expected level for 11-year-olds.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said marking inaccuracies was another reason 'to see an end to high-stakes testing and league tables, which distort the education our children receive'.

But the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said it was confident standards were robust this year. A spokesman said: 'The 2009 mark schemes were carefully designed and test markers received comprehensive training on how to apply them.

Kathleen Tattersall, of exams watchdog Ofqual, said: 'As regulator, Ofqual is continuing to monitor the quality control of the marking of this year's papers.'

Last year SATs descended into chaos as computer problems and administrative failures delayed test marking by several weeks. More than a million 11 to 14-year-olds broke up for summer holidays without knowing results that should have been published on July 8. When the grades did arrive, schools complained that they were wrong or missing, and thousands of pupils were incorrectly marked as 'absent' for tests they actually sat. It emerged that one in three pupils were given the wrong grade.

The Government later banned ETS Europe, the U.S. firm that marked the tests, from checking results. In March 2006 it emerged that some 2005 papers were marked incorrectly because they got wet.

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NHS nurse mocked frail old lady as 'drama queen'

By the time Ann McNeill was admitted to Edgware Hospital, in North London, her legs were raw and covered in bandages. The 71-year old grandmother had been diagnosed with the superbug MRSA, and the infection Clostridium difficile at nearby Barnet General Hospital following a succession of major operations.

Having spent decades working as a nurse, Mrs McNeill hated to bother the staff during the 10 months she spent in both hospitals before she died. When the stench of dried urine from a neighbouring bed in her ward in Barnet became overpowering, it was her husband Richard, who asked if it could be cleaned.

When a nurse told the frail pensioner that she "would never be going home" Mrs McNeill said nothing, only weeping later, when her husband visited. In October 2007 she was transferred to Edgware Hospital. The skin on her legs was raw, and partly covered with bandages, both to protect her wounds, and the fragile skin surrounding them.

As a night nurse roughly hoisted her into bed, knocking her legs, Mrs McNeill gasped in pain. "Oh, we've got a drama queen here," laughed the nurse, leaving the pensioner in agony, as blood slowly soaked the sheets. On many occasions, she was left in her own faeces.

Her widower recalls: "She hated disturbing the nursing staff, but she was totally compos mentis and she hated the indignity of it. She would plead with them to change her, but the answer was always firm: 'We will get to you when we have time". Mr McNeill was not convinced that time pressures were the problem. "Often I would wait at the nursing station, for perhaps five minutes, to ask for help for Ann. "They would keep chatting about this and that and I didn't want to interrupt them, I wanted to be polite. "But then when they got to the end of their conversation, they would go off, as though I wasn't there at all. I remember once I felt so desperate, I said to them, 'Are we invisible?'"

On another occasion, he arrived at Edgware hospital to find his wife sitting in a chair, her clothes covered in vomit. He was unable to find a nurse. In the next bed, the heavy breaths of an old woman, whose oxygen mask had fallen off, appeared to go undetected by staff.

On Monday 15 October 2007, less than a week after her surgeon said Mrs McNeill was recovering well, she died of bronchopneumonia, a condition which is closely linked to MRSA.

Her widower, now 75, says: "I know there is nothing I can do to bring Ann back, but it destroys me to think of what she went through, even with me trying my best for her every step of the way."

A spokesman for Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals trust, which runs Barnet General Hospital, extended their apologies to Mrs McNeill's family for additional distress caused by the circumstances surrounding her death. He said the patient was in the hospital's care for an extended period of time, and that the trust would be happy to meet with her widower to hear his concerns. He added: "We are anxious to take the opportunity to make any improvements in the quality of care we provide."

Barnet primary care trust, which runs Edgware Community Hospital, said it worked to maintain high standards of health care and had not received any complaints about Mrs McNeill's care.

SOURCE

This is the sort of nut that the NHS can unleash on you

NHS nutritionist gave 'dangerous' food advice to diabetic patients

An NHS nutritionist told diabetic patients to eat a range of bizarre and trendy foods, including some that were 'dangerous', a disciplinary panel heard yesterday. Katie Peck, 32, recommended dandelion tea, kelp granules, milk thistle, flax seed oil and chromium supplements - all apparently without any clinical reason. She also allegedly recommended expensive vitamin supplements, including co-enzyme Q10, for which there is no evidence of any benefit.

A colleague at the Coxheath Centre Diabetes Clinic, near Maidstone in Kent, told a hearing most of the advice was baffling but harmless - but in the cases of two diabetic patients it was 'dangerous'. One, known as ES, who was on insulin and was also being treated for a thyroid condition, was told to take granules of kelp seaweed - a rich source of iodine. Sally Norris, a specialist diabetes dietician, told the Health Professions Council that extra iodine could dangerously interfere with both conditions. 'There would be a safety issue,' she said.

Another diabetic patient, KA, who was awaiting kidney dialysis and had high potassium levels, was told to eat half a large green banana - even though the fruit is known to be rich in potassium. Mrs Norris told the panel: 'What does that mean? Why does the banana have to be green? 'And I would certainly not expect somebody with high potassium levels to be recommended to eat bananas because it would be dangerous.'

Miss Peck also allegedly forbade some patients from eating grapes or drink coffee, and said one should eat cottage cheese - but never with pineapple. She banned mashed potato and alcohol and said red meat should not be eaten more than once a fortnight. Her other directions included that water must be filtered, eggs must be free-range and the dried fruit on one patient's daily porridge had to be organic, the panel heard.

Mrs Norris said there was no reason for that and it would cost the patients more.

She also said to have inappropriately recommended specific brands of products, including Rachel's probiotic yoghurt, Tilda brown basmati rice and Alpro soya milk.

Miss Peck was hired by West Kent NHS Primary Care Trust to cover for Mrs Norris when she went on maternity leave in 2005. When she returned to work in 2007 she sat in on one of Miss Pecks' consultations and was immediately concerned when Miss Peck tried to measure a patient's waist 'in the wrong place completely'. Mrs Norris then went through files and found dozens of examples of peculiar advice, which she reported to managers. She said: 'I was very concerned that things had been written down that didn't seem to have any explanation behind them and I could not see any clinical reasoning. 'There was no evidence that I could see that was behind what was being recommended.'

Miss Peck faces disciplinary charges in relation to 27 patients. John Harding, for the HPC, said: 'The allegation is that Katie Peck's fitness to practise is impaired by reason of lack of competence. 'It will be seen that in relation to each patient there is a common theme that develops - that the note-keeping was in a poor state and that recommendations made by Katie Peck were without any obvious reasons.'

Miss Peck denies any wrongdoing. The hearing in South London continues.

SOURCE

2009-07-09T00:06:00.001+11:30

People aren't as envious as the Leftists think

The most fascinating document I read all week wasn’t Michael Jackson’s obituary, or the breakdown of BBC expenses, or even the desperately moving Twitter feeds from Iran. It was a lengthy piece of research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on attitudes to inequality in Britain. And the reason it was so absorbing was that it showed that almost all activists’ and politicians’ assumptions – including mine – about how people feel about inequality are wrong.

The main parties think that poverty and inequality will be one of the key battlegrounds of the next election. They can all see that unequal societies are associated with every social ill, from crime to addiction. The Conservatives, with their concern for broken Britain, want the poorest to be brought into the mainstream. Labour is mortified by the fact that while it has been in power, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer, while it is now harder than ever to move between the two.

All parties assume that the financial crisis has focused people’s fury on the unjustified salaries paid to the very rich; that the recession will mean there’s much more sympathy for the unemployed; and that there is a new concern about bridging the gap between the top and bottom.

I’m in that camp. These are the things I know, not least because they are endlessly repeated: that we live in more egalitarian times, that the ages of automatic deference and respect for those higher in the social hierarchy are over, and that most people think that Britain’s social immobility is a scandal.

Well, it’s not so. Rowntree’s research, among more than 1,000 adults of all income groups, shows that more than two thirds of them admire the rich, and assume that their high salaries are a proper reward for ability, effort and performance. On the other hand, they are largely contemptuous of the poor, especially those who live on benefits. Those people are routinely described as scroungers.

The research group are sublimely unconcerned about social mobility, because they think it exists. It’s now harder to move class in Britain than in any other developed country except the United States, and yet 69% believe that there are enough opportunities for anyone to get on in life if they really want to. And though most people described themselves as very concerned about inequality, it wasn’t the gap between rich and poor they cared about. It was the gap between the top and themselves that they wanted to see narrowed.

At first glance, it’s hard to see why people should be so positive about the rich, so oblivious to the many social and financial obstacles faced by the less privileged, and so harsh about the poor. It’s so clearly untrue that the hawkers of dodgy mortgages are more useful or work harder than, say, carers for the elderly. It’s equally untrue that the dim public-school boy faces the same difficulties in finding a good job as the dim child from a comprehensive. Only one thing can explain people’s determined fantasy about how society works, and that is our desperate need to make sense of the world by believing that it is just.

We’re told we live in a meritocracy, so despite the evidence around us, we pretend it’s so. Anything else would be too painful to bear. We can tolerate the comfortable or luxurious lives that some people live only by telling ourselves that they are deserved. These people must work much harder than we are prepared to, or have skills we cannot dream of.

In the research sessions, participants projected all kinds of virtues – dedication, private study, willingness to tolerate stress – onto those with high salaries. Equally, we might find the grim poverty or simple limitations of others’ lives indefensible unless we told ourselves that these people had a choice, and it’s wilfulness or laziness that keeps them as they are. The idea that our life chances are radically unfair is more than we can admit.

Our need to believe in the worth of those above us might give us a different explanation for the anger over bankers’ salaries and MPs’ expenses. It isn’t the fact of their high incomes that enraged us. It was that their selfishness and incompetence destroyed our illusions about their worth. Our faith required us to believe that they deserved what they got. Having their faults exposed has made us uncomfortable.

This mass delusion doesn’t mean that attempts to make Britain more equal are doomed, but it does show that those who think it desirable have to take a different approach. Expecting most people to care about inequality as an abstract concept is pointless: they don’t. They think that quite a lot of it is fair. But the Rowntree research does show a way forward.

The research group were asked which of three societies they would rather live in – a traditional free-market one, with few protections; an egalitarian one that cut the gap between rich and poor; or one that gave priority to improving everyone’s quality of life.

Almost nobody, not even the rightwingers, opted for a society that made economic growth and standards of living a priority, especially if these were accompanied by greater insecurity. Yet this is pretty much what Labour has offered in the past dozen years – increased wealth but much more precarious lives. If that bargain ever was appealing, it isn’t any more.

Only a small number opted for the egalitarian choice. The overwhelming majority chose the third. [Which only capitalism can deliver]

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Woman who cried rape after date with man she met in internet chatroom is jailed for a year

In one of their rare acts of judicial sanity, the Brits do prosecute these bitches -- but the woman should get the same sentence the man would have got if she had been believed

An innocent man almost lost his freedom after being accused of rape by a woman he dated through the internet. Gary Wood was hoping for romance when he arranged to meet Natalie Jefferson after chatting to her online - but ended up facing a potential 10-year jail term. Instead 27-year-old Jefferson is beginning a 12-month jail term after detectives saw through her lies.

Mr Wood, 31, of Walker, Newcastle, said he was still baffled by her motives. 'I just want to know why,' he said. 'Maybe she's is messed up in the head, maybe she's an attention-seeker or maybe it is a bit of both, but I could have lost everything because of what she did.'

Newcastle Crown Court heard how Jefferson, of Fellgate, South Tyneside, agreed to meet Mr Wood in Newcastle's Gateshead before going for a drink in nearby Jesmond. But she received a phone call during the night and claimed one of her children had been taken to hospital. Mr Wood offered to go with her but she only let him travel on the Metro underground system part of the way with her.

He phoned her later but was horrified when she told him she had been raped by a stranger. It was a lie - but she had already called police claiming Mr Wood himself had raped her. Soon officers were on his doorstep to arrest him. He said: 'I got a call saying the police wanted to speak to me. They didn't say what it was at first but when they came to my flat, the officer said, "I will be up-front with you - we have had an allegation of rape against you."' Mr Wood was held in custody for three hours.

Jefferson - also known as Natalie Dawn Dodsworth - had alleged Mr Wood attacked her on January 7 near Newcastle's Luckies bar and even agreed to go to a rape crisis centre. But she was arrested and charged with perverting the course of justice after investigating officers interviewed Mr Wood and witnesses, as well as studying CCTV, and grew suspicious about her version of events. In court Jefferson admitted the charge.

Robin Patton, prosecuting, said: 'It's quite clear she had concocted this account for no good reason at all. 'The man's medical examination was about to start but police, having viewed the CCTV footage, immediately stopped the examination because they were sure he was an innocent man.'

Ailsa MacDonald, defending, told the court: 'There is a considerable psychiatric background and she has alcohol problems.'

Pronouncing sentence, Judge Esmond Faulks said: 'This was a huge waste of police time and, more seriously, led to the arrest of an innocent man.' Det Con Graeme Barr, of Newcastle CID, said: 'We are happy with the sentence passed by the court as it sends out the message that people will be punished for making false reports of crime. 'Gary is an innocent man and she could quite easily have ruined his life. I hope he can now put this behind him and get on with his life.'

Mr Wood said: 'I had met her on the internet. She didn't seem right as soon as I met her and kept going to the toilet, which was strange, but I never thought she would do anything like this. 'I have never been in any trouble with the police before this. I was on bail for two weeks with this allegation hanging over my head. 'I can't stop thinking that if there had been no witnesses or CCTV to prove that she was lying I would have been in real trouble and would have been sent down. I would have lost my friends and everything I've got.' He added: 'It has still affected me and if I was to meet someone now, I would only do it in public. I am glad with the sentence but think she should have got more because she could be out and doing it to someone else in six months.'

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British tumour patient was treated in corridor

As Barbara McVernon was wheeled to the operation for brain surgery, she broke into song: "Wish me luck, as you wave me goodbye..." It was a typical gesture from an exuberant, sociable woman, who at the age of 76 was showing no signs of slowing down. If the keen artist and charity fund-raiser from Wokingham was fearful about the surgery to remove a tumour from her eye socket and temple, she was determined not to show it, recalls her daughter Lynne.

After the surgery, at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, in April 2006, Mrs McVernon remained in good spirits, laughing and joking with family and friends. However, further tests revealed that the growth – as well as pains in Mrs McVernon's hips, which her local hospital, the Royal Berkshire in Reading, had mistaken for arthritis – was in fact caused by multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow. Nonetheless her specialist was optimistic: if the will was there, the pensioner could survive five years.

Soon after Mrs McVernon was transferred back to the Royal Berkshire, one of her hips broke. She was sent to a specialist NHS hospital, The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, in Oxford, for surgery the following month. It went well. Yet in the days following the operation, the outgoing, lively woman became increasingly confused and depressed.

Amid repeated concerns raised by her family, staff insisted her behaviour was normal – until 11 days after the operation, when a doctor diagnosed diabetes. An investigation found staff had made a "critical error" when the elderly woman was admitted to the hospital, by keeping her on a high dose of steroids which should have lasted for just four days. The findings, which included an admission that the mistake could have caused the onset of diabetes, reached Lynne on the day her mother died.

In her last few weeks, the increasingly weak pensioner had been transferred back to the Royal Berkshire Hospital, soon after her family found out that she was suffering from MRSA, which she had already been carrying before treatment at the Nuffield.

Hours after the transfer, her daughter found her being treated in a corridor, before a bed could be found. As the quality of her life deteriorated, and amid chaotic care, Mrs McVernon lost the will to continue, says her daughter. "She was having hourly blood tests because of the diabetes, her hands were caked with blood, she had bed sores, she was upset, confused and disorientated because her blood sugar levels were see-sawing. "It was hard to believe Mum was the same woman who had been singing on her way to surgery."

On June 22, Mrs McVernon died of pneumonia, multiple myeloma and MRSA.

A spokesman for Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre Trust said patient safety was its top priority, and that it regretted that the McVernons' experiences did not fulfil its usual standards. It said the trust had been open about the findings of its investigation, and learned lessons from the case. The Royal Berkshire trust said it was "deeply disappointed" that the family had not raised any concerns since Mrs McVernon's death, so that any failings could be investigated.

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NHS units exposed over unacceptable conditions

This is a total whitewash. What they say about the food tells you that. British hospitals are notorious for inedible food

At least a dozen NHS units in England are treating patients in poor or unacceptable conditions, an official report says today. A national survey of 1,265 medical sites found that the vast majority of facilities scored either “excellent” (24 per cent) or “good” (60 per cent) for standards of cleanliness, decoration, linen, furniture and general state of repair. But of the rest, more than one in six sites (15 per cent) had only “acceptable” working conditions, while nine sites were rated “poor” by the local Patient Environment Action Team (PEAT) assessments.

Three sites — all rehabilitation units for mental health patients — were rated “unacceptable” for their environment: Windmill House in Bushey, West Hertfordshire; Norfolk Lodge, in Colliers Wood, South London; and Lodge Causeway, in Bristol.

The National Patient Safety Agency, which publishes the scores, said that poorly-performing sites would be followed up by the regional health authorities or the Care Quality Commission, the NHS regulator, to make sure standards were improved.

The PEAT programme was established in 2000 to assess all NHS hospitals with more than ten beds every year on a range of standards including food and whether patients were treated with dignity and privacy. The assessment teams consist of NHS staff, including nurses, matrons, doctors, catering and domestic service managers, executive and non-executive directors, dietitians and estates directors. Most also include patients and members of the public.

A total of 94 per cent of sites scored ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ ratings for levels of privacy and dignity, which examined the quality of their sleeping accommodation as well as toilet and bathroom facilities.

But Thorneywood Unit, a child mental health clinic run by Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, and Norfolk Lodge, part of South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust were rated unacceptable.

On food, 95 per cent of sites achieved an "excellent" or "good" ratings for quality, choice and availability of their menus [By British hospital standards, maybe]. Just one unit, Ogden House in Ramsgate, a mental health inpatient unit, was rated unacceptable for its food.

Ann Keen, the Health Minister, said that the increase in trusts achieving good results was “great news for NHS staff and patients”. “Cleanliness is a top patient priority and these results show that the measures we have in place are working. We are also delighted to see such high scores in the area of privacy and dignity.” Ms Keen said that she expected to see further improvements in next year’s results after a drive to eliminate mixed-sex accommodation in the NHS.

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HOW TO TURN AWAY INVESTORS: GREEN POLICE STATE BRITAIN

The boys in green are coming as the Environment Agency sets up a squad to police companies generating excessive CO2 emissions.

The agency is creating a unit of about 50 auditors and inspectors, complete with warrant cards and the power to search company premises to enforce the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), which comes into effect next year.

Decked out in green jackets, the enforcers will be able to demand access to company property, view power meters, call up electricity and gas bills and examine carbon-trading records for an estimated 6,000 British businesses. Ed Mitchell, head of business performance and regulation at the Environment Agency, said the squad would help to bring emissions under control. “Climate change and CO2 are the world’s biggest issues right now. The Carbon Reduction Commitment is one of the ways in which Britain is responding.”

The formation of the green police overcomes a psychological hurdle in the battle against climate change. Ministers have long recognised the need to have new categories of taxes and criminal offences for CO2 emissions, but fear a repetition of the fuel tax protests in 2000 when lorry drivers blockaded refineries.

The central unit, based in Warrington, Cheshire, can call on the agency’s national network of hundreds of pollution inspectors, many of whom will soon be trained in CO2 monitoring.

It will also be able to demand energy bills from utilities without the companies under investigation knowing they are being watched.

Perhaps most worrying for managers will be the publication of an annual league table ranking companies by performance in cutting emissions. The government hopes the potential shame of a lowly placing will drive organisations to greater energy efficiency.

Mitchell predicted the unit would audit about 1,200 businesses a year. The first stage would be a desk study of their energy bills and activities, followed by a visit when numbers do not add up. “The inspectors will carry warrant cards giving them powers of entry to collect evidence. We will also have access to company accounts with suppliers,” he said.

More HERE

Leftist discipline phobia brings predictable results in Britain

One teacher a day in hospital after attack

One teacher is hospitalised in England almost every day after being attacked at school, according to new figures. Almost 180 staff were forced to spend three days at home or working outside the classroom following a serious physical assault, it is disclosed. At least one-in-10 attacks involved teachers working in nursery or primary schools. Many resulted in "major injuries", including broken bones, dislocations, burns or even loss of sight.

It is feared the true scale of assaults may be significantly higher amid claims only a fraction are ever reported for fear of harming a school's reputation.

The latest disclosure was made in figures published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Bob Spink, the independent MP, who obtained the data in a Parliamentary question, said: "Teachers can hardly draw breath without being attacked or falling victim to a false allegation. All political parties pay a lot of lip service to the issue of discipline without carrying it through. If head teachers and governors were allowed to focus on getting discipline right then many other problems in our schools would be a lot easier to solve."

According to figures, 176 school staff suffered injuries "involving acts of violence" in 2007/8, the latest available data. The school year is normally 190 days. This included 17 injuries suffered by nursery or primary teachers and 33 staff who worked in special schools. In total, 26 attacks resulted in major injuries and 150 kept staff away from ordinary duties for three days or more. The figures came from data collected by the Health and Safety Executive.

Earlier this year, a teacher was awarded £280,000 in compensation after being attacked by a pupil at a Nottingham special school. The 13-year-old jumped on her back - placing her in a headlock - causing her to fall and injure her back and head. Sharon Lewis, who was 26 at the time of the assault in 2004, was forced to quit the profession after suffering nerve damage and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It came as research by the NASUWT union suggested nine-in-10 physical assaults in schools were never reported.

The Government insisted behaviour in schools was improving. Vernon Coaker, the Schools Minister, said ministers were introducing new requirements on schools to record incidents of bullying between pupils and verbal and physical assaults on staff. "We will also consult on whether schools should also be required to report these records to their local authority, and whether they should be required to record and report these incidents by type where the incident is motivated by a particular form of prejudice [for example] as racist, homophobic bullying incidents," he said. "

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UK: Kindness not enough to cut the queues : “Cheers all round as the Human Tissues Authority announce that the number of people donating kidneys to strangers has increased by 50 per cent. The only problem, alas, is that the increase is from ten people to fifteen. And three of those have yet to undergo surgery. In a country where 7,000 people are in need of a kidney, an increase of two donors is hardly a cause for celebration. Fortunately there is a long-ignored solution: compensating organ donors.”

2009-07-08T00:05:00.000+11:30

British oldsters' coffee morning banned for health and safety reasons

A group of pensioners have been banned from holding a coffee morning at a public library for health and safety reasons in case they spill hot drinks on children. This thin excuse to mess other people around just shows how power-hungry British bureaucrats are. They are little men desperate to find some way of making themselves significant

The seven members of the coffee morning for over 50s have met at Eye Library in Eye, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, every Tuesday for the last four years without incident. But council officials have now axed the meetings claiming that toddlers from a nearby nursery who use the library at the same time could be injured if hot coffee spilt on them.

Now members, who used to pay 20p each to the library to cover costs, have arranged to meet at each other's homes instead. Derek Taylor, one member of the coffee club, condemned the "laughable" move and claimed they had usually finished their drinks by the time the toddlers arrived for their half hour visit.

Mr Taylor, of Eye, said: "It is just laughable really. It is health and safety gone through the roof. Nearly four years ago we set up a coffee morning at Eye Library after the librarian at the time came up with the idea, and since then about seven of us have been going there every Tuesday.

"About three weeks ago a toddlers group started coming up on the Tuesday as well, and then this week when we went, we were told that we would not be allowed any tea or coffee because of health and safety reasons because there is a risk we could spill hot tea on the children.

"However, we understand that is not the case at all, because we have always finished our drinks before the children even arrive, and that it is the case that the librarian doesn't want to wash up extra cups. "It is very disappointing, we all thoroughly enjoy the weekly meeting, it is a chance for us all to catch up and have a chat."

Retired office worker Patricia Owen, 70, and her husband Ray, 69, from Eye Green, near Eye, have also been attending the coffee mornings since they were launched. Mrs Owen said: "We are being told we can't have a hot drink. Health and safety is a silly excuse. We have now made alternative arrangements and plan to have our coffee mornings at each other's homes."

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) called for sensible risk assessments to be made. A spokesman said: "This would seem to be a disproportionate reaction to risk. I'm sure a sensible compromise could be found that does not leave these pensioners on the streets."

A spokesman for Peterborough City Council, who run the library, said: "Eye Library is a small library and there were concerns about hot drinks being served to the group when there were small children sitting very close by. "However, we do not want to spoil anyone's fun, and will be speaking to both groups to see if we can be more flexible about the timings so that the nursery group are not in the library at the time the coffee morning is meeting."

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Health and safety fears are making Britain a safe place for extremely stupid people

By Boris Johnson

Another triumph of the Royal Society for the Extremely Stupid. They are now the most powerful lobbying force in the land. You can see the results of their campaigns on park benches, on street corners, on station platforms – and now their hectoring signage is sprouting on desolate beaches and once unspoilt stretches of moorland. They are more energetic than the RSPCA. They are more effective than the birdwatchers, the child‑protectors and the petrolheads put together. Indeed, for manic dedication they are only rivalled by Fathers4Justice. Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a big hand for this year's winner of the prize for the Most Successful Special Interest Group. I give you – the Royal Society for the Extremely Stupid.

It was some years ago that my daughter and I first became aware of their achievements. We were exploring the magical cliff-top castle of Tintagel and we came across a sign on the edge of the cliff. It was expensively hand‑painted and about 1ft high. It said: "Edge of cliff". As a statement of the plonkingly obvious, it could have been bettered only if there had been another sign with a vertical arrow saying "Sky". We laughed so much we almost fell off.

Since then, the Royal Society for the Extremely Stupid has been going from strength to strength. It has adorned the back of peanut packets with signs saying "May contain nuts"; it has embossed every plastic coffee sipper-lid with the information that the contents may be hot; and now, according to a wonderful pamphlet issued by the Manifesto Club, its activities are reaching a climax. I could direct you to a lovely pebble beach in Sussex, where visitors are warned with a hideous bright yellow sign and a pictogram of a man falling over that there is an "uneven surface". Another pictogram, complete with another tumbling idiot, warns that the beach may have a "slippery surface". Cor! I can just about see the case for warning railway passengers that if they run on a marble station concourse, and that concourse is wet, then they may be at risk of slipping.

But we are talking about a beach in Sussex. How dur-brained do you have to be to fail to grasp that pebble beaches are uneven and may be slippery? You might as well post a sign at the gates of the Vatican saying: "Caution: Pope at work". Or I could show you a park bench in London boasting an exclamation mark in a fluorescent yellow triangle and the warning, "May become wet". You don't say! A bench in London may become wet, the public is told. I wonder whether we are doing enough to alert people to this fact, that it is raining in London on average 6 per cent of the time. Perhaps we should have a giant sign at Heathrow saying: "Welcome to Britain – danger of moderate precipitation".

Then there is the deranged yellow sign in a Tooting cemetery warning visitors not to fall into open or sunken graves, and that disintegrating gravestones and other memorials may prove lethal to the bystander. But the all-time triumph of the Royal Society for the Extremely Stupid – the sign that clinched it for them at this year's awards – was a big road sign that went up in Swansea. The English version said that this was a residential area and there was no entry for heavy goods vehicles. But it was the Welsh translation that represented a masterpiece of Extremely Stupid lobbying. This read: "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfielthu." It was a few months before someone had the nerve to point out that this gnomic message meant: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated."

In that magnificent story – of how Swansea council managed to put up a Welsh out-of-office autoreply, in the belief that it was something to do with heavy goods vehicles – there is much to be learnt about modern Britain. But I single out that incident today because it so perfectly illustrates the unthinking way in which we erect street furniture. We pollute our landscape with signs and clutter of all kind, when they may have nil semiotic value and do nothing for "elf and safety".

People often ask me why there are so many traffic lights, and why they seem to spend such an unconscionable time on red. The answer is that there has indeed been a huge expansion of traffic lights in the past 10 years, and each one generally represents the culmination of some campaign.

Typically, there will have been an accident, and local campaigners will get together with families of the victims to demand a solution. In these circumstances, it is very difficult for local politicians to resist. On the contrary, the overwhelming temptation will be to "do something". And though a plausible case can be made for each intervention, the cumulative effect can be counterproductive.

Again, we have been going through a long period in which lobbyists have demanded that pedestrians be segregated from the streets with big steel railings; and though this may seem sensible in some ways, the railings produce perverse results. They add greatly to the hassle of getting around on foot. They make the streets less permeable to pedestrians – and by doing their bit to discourage walking, they may even be encouraging a fatal rise in obesity.

In any case, they are certainly a serious health hazard for cyclists, who are in danger of being crushed or scraped against them by vehicles. The same point can be made about some of the forest of black-poled signs that we allow to sprout in our paths, overloading us with non‑information and creating a new collision risk to those who use the streets.

Of course, there is a balance to be struck, and the interests of the blind must be protected; but people are increasingly frustrated with pointless street clutter, and are ready to go back to common sense. That is why many London boroughs are now actively looking at removing traffic lights, and that is why we in City Hall are pursuing urban-realm projects to end the bossing and restore freedom of movement.

In the meantime, if you have any more examples of the work of the Royal Society for the Extremely Stupid, I am all ears.

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Britain in battle for its soul, says Sydney Archbishop Peter Jensen

Britain is facing a “battle for the soul of the nation”, an archbishop warned yesterday at the inaugural meeting of a group that threatens to split the Church of England. The Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, called for a spiritual renewal of Church and State in his keynote speech to the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans in London. Dr Jensen, arguably the most powerful evangelical in the Anglican Communion and a driving force behind the conservative revival, said: “In this country, the Christian foundations have been shaken. In this and the next generation there will be fought what may amount to the last battle for the soul of the nation.

“It will be an ideological war, a war of ideas. But great issues will hang upon the outcome: the fate of a culture and the eternal fate of souls.” He warned: “The culture of the West has adopted and promulgated anti-Christian belief and practice.

“It confronts every Christian with the choice of submission or harassment. It pretends to be the true heir of the Christian faith, and that the entire structure of Christian thought can disappear into the receding past. The conflict is over the authority of Jesus Christ. The fact that sexual ethics is where the contest is sharpest should not divert us from this basic truth.”

Members of the fellowship said their agenda was to reform the Church of England from within and to bring the increasingly liberal Anglicans in the West back to their biblical Protestant roots. They are opposed to blessing gay civil partnerships, ordaining gay clergy and, in particular, the ordination of women bishops.

Many Anglicans believe the fellowship’s agenda is backward-looking and would alienate moderate believers. Delegates meeting in Westminster Central Hall took comfort from messages of support sent by the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. In her letter, the Queen sent “good wishes to all concerned for a successful and memorable event”. Dr Williams said: “I shall be glad to hold all of you in my prayers for the occasion.” Even the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, gave his backing to the new group, despite being an advocate of women bishops.

Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner, accused the Queen of “a serious error of judgment”. He said: “It is very alarming to see the Queen endorse a homophobic grouping within the Church of England.”

Bishop Greg Venables, primate of the Southern Cone in South America, told delegates: “Schism is not the point of what is happening. Schism is when you separate over secondary issues. This is about essential theology. That is where the divisions are coming. It is not schism, it is real separation.”

Leaders of the fellowship told The Times that they believed disestablishment was both inevitable and necessary if the Anglican Church was to remain true to its biblical heritage.

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Diary of despair of old lady who died in 'zoo' NHS hospital after 'catalogue of blunders by staff'

A horrifying journal of the neglect a great-grandmother suffered in hospital has been published by her family. Betty Dunn, 79, was admitted with a routine stomach problem but died six weeks later after a string of medical errors. During this time her relatives compiled the diary detailing her ordeal in a ward they grimly nicknamed the 'zoo'. The dossier tells how Mrs Dunn was:

* Given medication containing penicillin - despite warnings that she was allergic to it;

* Forced to sleep on a bare mattress;

* Made to wait 40 minutes for a bedpan;

* Treated by staff who could barely speak English;

* Made to eat a food substitute against medical advice.

At one stage, the mother- of-four's children became so desperate that they called the police for help but were told nothing could be done. In a final insult, the news that Mrs Dunn was dying was broken to her daughters in a busy corridor in front of other visitors.

The wartime Land Girl was being treated on a mixed-sex ward divided into bays at Tameside Hospital, in Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester. Labour had pledged to scrap this type of patient accommodation.

'The ward where mum was treated was like a zoo, and we called it that afterwards,' said her daughter, Liz Degnen, 49, today. "It was manic and chaotic with people running around like headless chickens. 'It doesn't matter if you're 79, 29, or 109, the way the hospital treated her was disgraceful. Every aspect of her care was just terrible. The staff did their best but there were not enough of them to cope. It's a scandal that hospitals can operate like this in this day and age.'

Mrs Dunn, a former dinner lady from Gamesley, near Glossop in Derbyshire, was admitted to Tameside on January 4 with complications from a stomach bug. 'On the night she was admitted for treatment mum was waving and blowing kisses and saying "See you, love",' said Mrs Degnen, a teaching assistant. 'Yet when we left for a few hours we came back to find her slumped across a bedside trolley. Her eyes were at the back of her head, rolling about.'

Her children responded by keeping a round-the- clock vigil and documenting the care she was given. They noted that one nurse even refused to change a faulty drip because she was about to go off duty. A few days later came the mix-up over the penicillin. 'At this point we were in tears,' one of the sisters wrote in the diary.

'Mum had yet again missed another dose, this was the final straw.' Mrs Degnen said yesterday: 'We didn't feel like they were listening to us. They were making blunder after blunder in our face. 'We could see there were other patients not being cared for. We tried to communicate with the staff but some of them couldn't even speak English'

Mrs Dunn's condition appeared to stabilise but on January 21 her family were told she had contracted C. diff. They had nursed her themselves without being offered protective gloves or aprons to guard against such infections. She recovered sufficiently however to be transferred to a local hospital only to deteriorate again and be moved back to Tameside. Five days later she died from complications caused by the hospital bug.

The hospital insists doctors were right to prescribe antibiotics containing penicillin as it was felt that the benefits would outweigh any minor side-effects. A spokesman said: 'We acknowledged and apologised for the shortcomings in Mrs Dunn's care. We would reiterate the apology here.' Staff have been sent for retraining or are having their performance monitored.

In 2006, a coroner condemned the hospital after four elderly patients died in agony following what he called 'despicable and absolutely chaotic' treatment.

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British man died of heart attack while cowardly paramedic stood outside and conducted a "risk assessment"

An open door frightened him!

A grandfather died of a heart attack while an emergency paramedic stood outside his home for 16 minutes, making a risk assessment. The family of Roy Adams, 60, claimed yesterday that he might have survived if the paramedic had entered immediately. London Ambulance Service said that it had begun an investigation into the circumstances of the delay.

Mr Adams, a chauffeur for the Metropolitan Police, dialled 999 complaining of breathing problems and chest pains just after midnight on June 29. He was told by the operator to leave his front door open so an ambulance crew could get to him quickly.

However, a paramedic who arrived six minutes later and saw the door open feared that the property was being burgled. He stayed on the doorstep carrying out a “risk assessment exercise” before calling police for support. When he entered the property, 16 minutes after arriving, he found Mr Adams in the front room of his home in Morden, South London. Mr Adams was not breathing and was dead when he reached hospital.

His daughter, Sarah Adams, 23, said: “It makes me feel sick to think that the paramedic waited outside for 16 minutes. They thought he was having a heart attack but didn’t go in. He was told to leave the door open, so I can’t understand how it was a surprise for the medic. The delay might have made all the difference. “I don’t understand what health and safety worries meant this man couldn’t help my dad. He was dying.”

Ms Adams said that the family was planning to sue the ambulance service. “No one has apologised to us for what has happened,” she said. “I would at least expect a letter or something like that — but I still want to take them to court.”

A spokesman for London Ambulance Service said that two “single responders” had been sent to the address in cars, an ambulance crew and a duty officer. “The first member of our staff to arrive carried out a full on-scene risk assessment and requested police assistance due to safety concerns,” the spokesman said. “He then took the decision to enter the property alone, while maintaining telephone contact with our control room. “We are looking into the incident and are in the process of contacting Mr Adams’s family to discuss things further.”

Concerns have been raised about the increasing use of solo paramedics as two-person crews were split up before the introduction of new government targets in April last year. Under the new targets, three quarters of the most serious emergencies have to be met within eight minutes of a 999 call being answered.

Ben Bradshaw, then a junior health minister, denied in December 2007 that “single responders” would put patients at risk. He said they could help to free resources and that emergency calls would be responded to more quickly.

Miss Adams added: “Why would you stand outside carrying out this risk assessment when you know an old man is inside with a serious medical emergency? My dad had been instructed to put the doors on the latch by the operator. Vital minutes were wasted. He might well have survived if the medic had gone in and treated him as soon as he arrived.”

The ambulance service spokesman described the risk assessment as a “mental checklist” which included considering the safety of the scene, types of risk and whether extra help or equipment was required. “We have a duty of care to treat patients but we also have to look after our staff,” he said. “In this case the medic conducted the assessment, had safety concerns and decided to call for back-up.”

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Vegetarian diet could cut risk of cancer by 45 per cent

And pigs could fly. More guesswork based on just a statistical association. It could be (for instance) that it is mainly fussy middle class people who are the vegetarians and middle class people are healthier anyhow. Or maybe vegetarians live more cautious and hence safer lives, thus exposing themselves to fewer dangerous substances etc. Speculation could go on and on but what's the point? NO causative inferences have been established and none are possible from evidence such as this

Eating a vegetarian diet can almost halve the risk of developing cancer, research suggests. A study of more than 61,000 individuals aged between 20 and 89 found those who did not eat meat reduced overall incidence of the disease by 12 per cent. But the most striking difference was in cancers of the blood, including leukaemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma with 45 per cent fewer cases among the vegetarians. Tumours of the stomach and bladder were also significantly less frequent in this group.

Professor Tim Key, a Cancer Research UK epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, said: 'Over a lifetime about one in three people will be diagnosed with cancer. So if 33 people in every hundred get cancer this would come down to about 29 with everyone following a vegetarian diet, which is 12 per cent lower.' However, Mr Key said the findings were not yet strong enough to advise the public to make dramatic changes to the way they eat as long as they are following an 'average balanced diet'.

Although it is widely recommended we eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day to reduce their risk of cancer and other diseases, there is little evidence looking specifically at a vegetarian diet.

Mr Key, whose findings are published in the British Journal of Cancer, added: 'More research is needed to substantiate these results and to look for reasons for the differences.' His team followed the participants, just over half of whom were meat eaters, for more than 12 years during which time 3,350 were diagnosed with cancer. They looked at the rates of cancer among the vegetarians, and then compared them with those of the meat eaters.

Mr Key said: 'Our study looking at cancer risk in vegetarians found the likelihood of people developing some cancers is lower among vegetarians than among people who eat meat. 'In terms of what explains this we have to look at what other research is going on. For stomach cancer there is already quite a lot of evidence that high intake of food such as processed meat may increase risk. 'Obviously, vegetarians who are not eating meat would not have that risk factor. It could be something about being a vegetarian that is protective, or alternatively it could be something about meat actually increasing the risk.'

Su Taylor, of the Vegetarian Society, said: 'This latest research adds to a growing body of evidence that vegetarians are less likely to get cancer. 'It could be they are simply more likely to stick to the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, thereby eating more roughage, or it could be more complicated than this.'

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Coverup of bullying at a British government grade school

Dinner lady faces dismissal for telling parents about attack on daughter

A dinner lady is facing the sack for breaching “pupil confidentiality” after she blew the whistle on school bullies. Chloe David, seven, was tied up and whipped with a skipping rope by fellow pupils at Great Tey Primary School in Essex. Her parents, Scott and Claire David, received a letter from the school which said only that Chloe had been hurt by some other children. It did not mention that she had been tied up.

Carol Hill, who serves food at the school, told Mr and Mrs David the full story of their daughter’s ordeal. “She had eight knots around her wrists and had been whipped across the legs with a skipping rope,” she said. “I took her into the school, along with the four boys who had been seen with her. Two admitted it,” she told the Colchester Gazette.

But Mrs Hill, 60, has now been suspended while the school investigates if she is guilty of gross misconduct for discussing a pupil outside of school. Mrs Hill saw Chloe’s mother shortly after the incident. “As I was talking to her I said I was really sorry about what had happened and then it became clear she did not know the whole story. “I had to tell her because she then realised there was more to it.”

Mrs David said she was angry she had not been invited to school to discuss what had happened, especially as the parents of those accused had been called in for a meeting. “The headteacher had written a note saying Chloe had been hurt by some other children and she was sure she would tell me all about it, but I should have been told the full story,” Mrs David said.

Chloe and her brother Cameron, five, have been taken out of the school by her parents. “I could not send her back, as I can only think about her being tied up,” Mrs David said. Her husband has informed police about the incident.

The school says that Mrs Hill should not have discussed a pupil outside school. Debbie Crabb, headteacher at the school, confirmed that an incident took place during the school lunchtime. “The matter is being dealt with internally in accordance with our behavioural policy and all the relevant parties have been informed. “It would not be appropriate to discuss this in any further detail.”

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2009-07-07T00:10:00.001+11:30

British prisoners on run cannot be named 'due to privacy rights'

Prisoners on the run from Holleseley Bay prison cannot be identified because it would breach their rights to privacy, the Ministry of Justice has said. Civil servants have refused to name inmates who have fled prison even though individual police forces will often identify them if they pose a risk to the public. They say releasing their names would breach obligations under the Data Protection Act.

The latest development emerged in response to Freedom Of Information requests to name inmates on the run rom the prison near Woodbridge, Suffolk. The open prison which has sea views and once held Tory peer Jeffrey Archer is known as Holiday Bay because of its easy-going regime. The Ministry of Justice confirmed 39 prisoners had absconded from Hollesley Bay between January 1, 2007, to March 31, 2009. It also provided a general list of crimes they were sentenced for and confirmed that 16 involved violence. The offenders included nine robbers, two serving sentences for attempted robbery, one for wounding and four others for grievous bodily harm.

But the ministry refused to say how many - if any - had been recaptured, saying their identities had to be protected from third parties.

John Gummer, the Suffolk Coastal MP, said he was aghast at the decision and promised to raise the matter in parliament with Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary. He said: "It's intolerable and entirely unacceptable. There is no sense in which a prisoner's identity is a private matter. In my view he sacrifices that when he becomes a prisoner. "This annoys me very much indeed. We have gone mad if this is what we are doing. "What I will be doing is putting down a question to the Justice Minister on Monday to ask for the information. I shall insist this is information that should be in the public domain. "I think this will prove Hollesley Bay has ceased to be treated as an open prison in the historic way, but is now receiving prisoners who would not have been sent to it 10 years ago."

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "Whilst it is in the public interest to be aware of offenders who have escaped from custody as they may help in identifying the absconders thereby enabling the police to detain them; it is not in the public interest to prejudice any enquiries or operations the police may be conducting into apprehending the absconder. "It is the general policy of the Ministry of Justice not to disclose, to a third party, personal information about another person. "This is because the Ministry of Justice has obligations under the Data Protection Act and in law generally to protect this information."

In January 2007 Derbyshire Police refused to release pictures of two convicted murderers on the run from jail. Chief Constable David Coleman said Jason Croft and Michael Nixon posed "no risk'' and the force had to consider the Human Rights Act and data protection laws when asked to publish photographs. The force later denied human rights had been a factor.

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British Couple lose custody of children after 'school security concerns'

A couple have lost custody of their children after the father asked for permission to pick them up from inside the school gates. The man, a business consultant, was concerned that two of his three children – who are all under 13 – might be at risk of abduction because of the family's connections. Telling the school that the children were related to European royalty and that his brother was a senior Army officer, the father is said to have asked for permission – which was granted – to pick up his children inside the two schools attended by his eldest children.

However, one of the head teachers went to the police because of her "concerns". This led to the parents' background being investigated and concerns being raised, initially over the father's mental state and then for the safety of his children.

Lord Monckton, who has investigated the allegations, described the episode as "the worst case of child abduction by social services that I have ever come across". He accused a social worker and a police officer, both female, of plotting together against the couple, who live in the east of England. Lord Monckton has now reported the two women to the local police force and council for alleged improper conduct.

Lord Monckton claims that on May 18 a social worker approached the father as he arrived, with his wife, to pick up one of their children from school. The father has told the peer that when he was asked to accompany her, he demanded to see her identification but she refused to show him. He claims he was then handcuffed by two police officers.

His wife was also detained when she went to remonstrate, and their youngest child was taken away screaming, according to the family's account. Later all three children were taken into care.

The father was then detained under the Mental Health Act, although his wife was released later the same day. "However, the father's supporters say that on May 28, he appeared before a mental health tribunal and was given a complete discharge; yet his children remain in care.

The Sunday Telegraph has had no direct contact with the family. It is understood that the social worker and police officer have justified their actions in statements to a family court. A council spokesman said: "We have no comment to make because the matter is in front of the courts."

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British patient lived with cancer for 50 years before dying of bedsore in an NHS hospital

Cancer patient Pamela Goddard battled against cancer for 50 years before she died of an infected bedsore during a stay in hospital. The treatment for the cancer appeared to be working, but the bedsore continued to get worse.

Pamela Goddard had great faith in the NHS. It had, after all, kept her alive for more than half her 82 years. The piano teacher first contracted breast cancer in the 1960s and had survived a series of recurrences of the disease over the years. So when it returned last year, this "completely vital" woman, who was still working up to 30 hours a week, was fully expected survive. The cancer did not kill her, but a bedsore did.

What appeared to be the start of one was noted on her back as she was admitted for radiation treatment in September and it was allowed to gradually develop into a "raging sore" which left Mrs Goddard moaning in pain. During four weeks of what her family describe as "torture" in a bed in East Surrey Hospital, the sore resulted in a fatal blood infection and she died on October 27.

Her son Adrian Goddard, who lives in the US, said: "She survived cancer for 40 years, then died from a bedsore. "It is just beyond belief that they could let a bedsore develop to the point where it actually kills someone from septicaemia." He said the nurses seemed largely unconcerned by the growing size of the sore and his mother's increasing pain. "The bedsore was painful. There were various procedures that should have been done. You are supposed to debride the thing, clean it, treat it. "She was supposed to be lifted and moved so there's not constant pressure on it," Mr Goddard said.

"There were explanations like 'there was only one nurse and it wasn't possible to do it or the equipment was broken'... just a series of excuses. "Most of the time there were [enough nurses]. None of them struck me as being frantically busy to put it mildly. "There were lots of conversations about last night's activities in the pub, a lot of strolling around, looking at charts without doing anything. "The level of crisis that attracts their attention has to be very high for them to put down their biscuits. I guess they get inured to it, the moaning, the fact my mother was in great pain."

The first sign Mrs Goddard was unwell came early in 2008 when she suffered from back pain. She went to Barts Hospital in London but the recurrence of cancer which was the cause of the pain was not diagnosed until she broke her leg in June. The treatment for the cancer appeared to be working, but the bedsore continued to get worse despite attempts to treat it with "maggot therapy" in which maggots are used to clean out the wound.

On October 11, Mr Goddard said a doctor told him that "she was recovering well, except there was something in the blood work, which suggested an infection". "If it didn't go away, he said he would give her penicillin or something," Mr Goddard said. "It never occurred to him this by now raging bedsore was the source of the infection."

Mr Goddard said he and other members of the family had tried to persuade nurses and doctors to take more action, but said the "inertia was extraordinary, the worst sort of institutional dysfunction".

Mr Goddard said anyone in a similar situation should "do what you need to do to find some sort of private care for them". "She certainly wasn't ready to die. To the extent she realised it was happening, she must have been horrified," he said. "The thing that makes me most angry was she had such faith in the system and it let her down so badly. "She was basically in torture over a four-week period. Then she was drugged up and left to die. "It's unconscionable, very sad."

Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust Director of Nursing, Mary Sexton, said: "We offer our sincere condolences to the family of Pamela Goddard on the loss of their mother. "We are committed to providing high quality patient care and are sorry that on this occasion the family feel that that standard has not been met. "We have received a formal complaint, which we have responded to, but are carrying out further investigations at the request of the family.

"The presence of pressure sores is associated with a twofold to fourfold increased risk of death, but this is because pressure sores are a marker for underlying disease severity and other co-morbidities. "Mrs Goddard was receiving complex treatment for a number of medical conditions from a number of health care organisations at the time of her death."

SOURCE

11 serious errors a day in NHS surgery

Eleven people are seriously harmed during NHS surgery every day, it emerged yesterday. The number of major errors has risen by 28 per cent in five years, with more than 4,000 patients hurt in 2007/08. Mistakes include objects such as scalpels and coils being left inside patients, organs being punctured, and the wrong dosage of drugs being given.

A total of 722 objects were left inside patients during surgery last year – one every two and a half days. That number has soared by 13 per cent in the five years to 2007/08.

The figures were revealed just days after a damning MPs' report found that many hospitals are routinely covering up such mistakes. The Commons health select committee warned that another hospital disaster like the one at Stafford, where up to 400 people died, could not be ruled out – because managers were putting Whitehall targets and cost-cutting above patient safety. Government policy 'too often' gave the impression that hitting waiting list targets, achieving financial balance and attaining elite foundation trust status were more important than patient safety. 'This has undoubtedly, in a number of well documented cases, been a contributory factor in making services unsafe,' the report said.

The MPs added that many mistakes were not reported by the NHS – raising the possibility that the recorded number of medical mishaps is just the tip of the iceberg.

The latest figures were uncovered by the Liberal Democrats in a parliamentary answer. Health spokesman Norman Lamb said: 'These figures raise serious concerns and call into question the Government's claim to be making patient safety a priority. 'There really is no excuse for leaving objects inside people. Far too many avoidable mistakes are still being made. 'Many doctors and nurses are under enormous amounts of pressure to meet Government targets. We have to ensure that patient safety isn't being compromised to satisfy the whims of Whitehall. 'If we really want to raise standards in the NHS then we need to give local people the power to hold their health services to account.'

The figures show that there have been a total of 17,921 errors during surgery over the past five years. The number of cases every year has shot up by 28 per cent to 4,161 in 2007/08 – 11 a day.

Most of the cases involve people having organs mistakenly punctured, which can lead to haemorrhaging. Over the last five years, the organs of 12,125 patients were punctured, with the annual figures soaring 33 per cent to 2,817 in 2007/08.

Hundreds of other surgical mistakes were reported, including not removing or inserting tubes properly, using wrongly-matched blood, forgetting to give drugs on time, and not sterilising equipment properly. Failure to sterilise is a key method by which superbugs such as C. Diff and MRSA can spread.

There were also dozens of reports of the catch-all 'performance of inappropriate operations'. The total uncovered by the LibDems represents only a fraction of the mistakes made in the NHS every year, as it only covers errors during operations. Overall, there are around 250,000 mistakes causing harm to patients reported across the Health Service every year. More than 3,600 of those affected die as a result.

SOURCE

Migrants are going to Britain, come hell or high water

Gazing across the Channel in the direction of the white cliffs of Dover, Amir Gul stood on Calais beach and imagined himself on the other side - and living the dream that has brought him 3,500 miles from Afghanistan. "A hundred times in the past month I have tried to get into lorries," the 15-year-old said in fluent English. "The police or drivers always throw me off and sometimes they beat me. But I will not stop until I reach London, unless I am killed trying, even if it takes me a year."

In the sand dunes and scraps of waste ground around Calais, a ragged army of migrants desperate to breach British border controls is slowly growing in number, and they are as determined as ever. Nobody is sure how many live in the squatter camps or sleep rough in parks, but the United Nations estimates that there are now around 1,500 in the Calais area alone – a figure steadily approaching the 2,500 who were to be found at Sangatte refugee camp before it was closed in 2002.

Security has been tightened at the port and far fewer illegal migrants get through to Britain now, according to the UK's Border Control Agency. It told The Sunday Telegraph that effective control of Calais port and the routes across the Channel was a success story.

But the fact that it is harder to reach Britain merely means that the migrants - almost all of them men and boys - hang around in Calais for even longer, months instead of weeks, as they attempt to stow away on lorries or in cars. Meanwhile they live in conditions which are so appalling that last week the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees opened an office in the town, only the second in Europe for an agency which is more typically found in troublespots like Congo or Pakistan.

UN officials feel they must do something for the inhabitants of the stinking "jungles" where desperate men and boys fight each other with knives and suffer diseases like scabies and TB, as the filth, frustration and violence take their toll. The UNHCR works with hard-pressed charities that try to help the migrants and encourages them to apply for asylum in France. But only 120 enquiries have been made in the past month.

"France is no good. I want to get into London because I will get a house and money [He's right about that. The good old generous British taxpayer!], and I can work there," said an Afghan man who was killing time in a park until nightfall, when he was going to look for a lorry to hide in.

On the beach, French families in swimming trunks and bikinis were enjoying themselves in the sunshine apparently oblivious to the young Afghans and Iraqis washing their grimy clothes in the surf.

Mr Gul knows it could be months before he successfully stows away in a lorry - or even in the boot of an unwary motorist - and sneak across the Channel to his promised land, now so tantalisingly close. Until then he will have to sleep rough in a filthy camp, hidden in a thicket of thorn bushes behind the beach. He sleeps under a plastic tarpaulin donated by a charity, trying to ignore the stench from the surrounding bushes which are used as a lavatory.

Every day at noon he walks through the suburbs of Calais to a soup kitchen in a car park, where gangs of Africans, Iraqis and Afghans jostle and argue in the queue. Tribal and ethnic differences rankle, and knives are pulled when tempers fray. Caroline Nazanin, a nurse who has worked in the camps, said: "The frustration drives some of them crazy - they become violent and fight each other when arguments get out of control."

Yet despite all this, Mr Gul had no interest in seeking asylum in France. He was determined to stay in Calais for as long as it takes for him to stow away succesfully and get to Britain.

Marie-Ange Lascure, UNHCR's spokeswoman, said migrants were arriving in bigger numbers than a few years ago. "They want to go to England because the people smugglers tell them it is a beautiful place, where they can easily earn money to send home to their families," she said. Persuading them to instead claim asylum in France was a struggle, she admitted. Under an EU rule whereby an asylum claim must be made in the first safe port of entry, if the migrants have already been fingerprinted on arrival in Greece or Italy the French authorities can deport them back there.

So some migrants scar their fingertips by heating up a plate until it is hot, then pressing their fingers to it. For several weeks the fingers are too blistered for prints to be taken, providing temporary relief from the risk of deportation if they are arrested or checked.

Residents of Calais have become increasingly worried by the growing desperation of migrants, and last year elected a conservative-minded mayor, Natacha Bouchart, who blames the temptation of Britain's generous welfare state for attracting migrants to their town. "Calais is a hostage to the British," she complained earlier this year. Jean-Lou Hereng, 46, who owns a café near the biggest camp, known as the "jungle", said: "The problem is as bad as it has ever been. They are aggressive and dirty, and there are fights between them."

Other Frenchmen are more sympathetic. "It is difficult for us, and it is difficult for them," said Jonathan Corbeau, 22, a welder who lived almost opposite an encampment of Afghans. Nevertheless, he had put up a strong fence and bought a dog after his wife was molested by migrants a few weeks ago.

French police frequently raid the camps, and sometimes destroy them. Sixteen vanloads of CRS riot police arrived on Thursday as bulldozers levelled a derelict warehouse which 30 Sudanese from the war-torn province of Darfur had been using as a temporary home. "My money and clothes are now buried under there," one of them said, gesturing at a pile of tons of debris. He had simply moved with his friends a few yards to a take over a small park.

Many of the Afghans, who are now the majority of migrants at Calais, said they had fled the Taliban. Samim Siddique, 24, from Khost, rolled up his trouser leg to show a bayonet scar where he had been tortured by terrorists who wanted him to carry a bomb into the university where he was studying. "The Taliban don't like education, and there was no place where I would be safe from them in Afghanistan," he said. "We all want to go to England, we speak the language and we can work there. I want to study IT, and then set up a print business. "We hate being in this camp, it is the life of an animal here. We have to wait for months to get into a lorry, but every week a couple of boys don't come back in the morning - they have caught a lorry across the sea. "I will keep trying. One day I will get to England."

SOURCE

Useless British university graduates

Their education has failed them. Employers forced to leave jobs unfilled as they cannot find competent recruits

Almost one in ten employers will be forced to leave graduate jobs unfilled this year because they cannot find quality recruits, a report reveals today. Dozens will be left with vacant posts despite the recession because of shortages of applicants with the right workplace skills and degree disciplines. In some cases, graduates lack commercial savvy and the high-level communication skills needed to deal with senior directors and clients. In others, bosses struggle to find applicants with specialised engineering or scientific knowledge because not enough students have studied those subjects.

Employers recruiting in less popular industry areas or far-flung locations are particularly affected, said the Association of Graduate Recruiters. Its revelation that 8 per cent of employers expect to have unfilled posts this year emerged as competition for jobs among graduates reached record levels.

The AGR's survey of 225 employers says the overall number of posts available has been cut by a quarter - a squeeze similar in scale to the last slump in 1991. Starting salaries have been frozen and few bosses expect to boost either pay or vacancy numbers in 2010.

On average, 49 graduates are battling it out for each graduate job - up from 30 this time last year. Competition is particularly intense for jobs in investment banks or fund management, with an average of 82 applicants per place. For financial services it is 76 and retail 65. Some employers reported receiving more than 150 applications per place. Investment banking, IT, construction and engineering are among sectors which have squeezed vacancies particularly dramatically.

Yet some employers said they were disappointed by sloppiness in application forms. Others said they were considering introducing 'motivation questionnaires' amid evidence that some applicants are seeking work they have no interest in simply to get a graduate post.

SOURCE

UK: Parents of unruly schoolchildren to be fined

And so the parent whacks the misbehaving kid and then gets hauled before a court for child abuse!

Parents could be fined or sent to prison if their children misbehave, under powers to be awarded to schools. They form part of a government White Paper on education to be published by the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, tomorrow.

Most schools operate agreements under which parents and pupils undertake to promote good behaviour, but they are not enforceable. The new powers could see parents who fail to abide by them fined or given community sentences. In some cases, they could end up in prison if they did not pay the fines.

Mr Balls said on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC 1 that national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds and exam league tables would stay. The White Paper also spells out entitlements for parents and pupils.

SOURCE

Faith re-emerges in the Church of England: "A hardline Anglican group launched today could cause a “disastrous” split in the Church of England, an evangelical bishop has warned. The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans is opposed to the ordination of gay clergy, blessings for gay marriage or civil partnership, and the consecration of women bishops. The new fellowship will today publish letters from the Queen, supreme governor of the Church of England, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, acknowledging its launch. Its founders claim it is nothing more than an “orthodox” movement intended to bring about reform and renewal from within. They claim it bears comparison with Anglican agencies such as the Church Mission Society. Archbishops of conservative Anglican provinces from around the world, including the Nigerian primate Dr Peter Akinola, have sent messages of support. Dr Graham Kings, consecrated last month as Bishop of Sherborne and founder of the moderate evangelical grouping Fulcrum, said the new fellowship represented a structure that would allow its founders to “split” from the Church of England.... Significantly, Dr Robert Duncan, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, the newly founded province that is claiming to be the authentic Anglican Church in the US but is awaiting recognition from the Archbishop of Canterbury, will give a keynote address to today’s meeting."

2009-07-06T00:24:00.000+11:30

'I grew up with gipsies (I'm even mistaken for one), but this land theft by 'travellers' sickens me...'

Will someone please explain why some sections of the gipsy community are called 'travellers'? As far as I can see - and I live on a farm in the heart of the country - the last thing they seem to do is 'travel'. From my experience, they appear far more interested in 'settling' than 'travelling'. For make no mistake, the illegal traveller 'settlements', which can now be found across Britain, have become a national scandal.

Exploiting phoney human rights laws, lame legislation - and the Government's commitment to so-called diversity - a small minority are occupying land wherever they please. Instead of the Government tackling the problem, the ordinary, rural taxpayers, who are so often impacted by these settlements, are left to pick up the pieces.

Before going further, I had better explain that I can empathise with the gipsy way of life, and I have known and worked with real gipsies all my life. Yes, as a small child growing up in the countryside, I was told scary stories about gipsies stealing children - and the fact that their horse-drawn caravans, or vardos, always seemed to be filled with curly-haired toddlers seemed to lend those stories an element of truth. But on the whole, these were honest, hard-working people.

Every year, they would come to our village looking for seasonal work, and as a teenager I would work with them, picking fruit and hoeing sugar beet. They were fascinating folk with a distinctive accent, a sense of humour and great tales to tell. One family, the Loveridges, came to our village during the summer months to sell lace and clothes pegs, and the patriarch, Jim, would sharpen knives and garden tools on a grinder driven by the pedals of his bike. He was entertaining when he tried to ride his bike after a visit to the pub, and the local hare population certainly dwindled whenever he 'walked' his lurchers.

But Jim was a kind, likeable man with a strong - albeit malleable - moral code. On one occasion, for example, he persuaded my father to let him use a field to graze his horse. 'I'll give yer ten bob for a fortnight, boss,' he promised. In the end, the horse was there all summer - and mysteriously vanished on the same dark night Jim's caravans pulled out. My father never saw his ten bob, but no real harm was done.

And then there was the case of the missing spade. After one of Jim's visits, a keen gardener and neighbour of ours named Denis discovered that his favourite spade had vanished - only to have it sold back to him by Jim the following spring. 'Well, I don't know how that happened, boss,' said Jim.

But old Jim was a remarkable man and had an extraordinary knowledge of traditional skills - cures and remedies, a culture that can still be explored at the Gordon Boswell Romany Museum, near Spalding. He may have had wandering eyes and eccentric ethics - but he was liked.

It was also through Jim that I came to visit the Appleby Horse Fair, an extraordinary gipsy event, where horses were sold - and raced down the A66 - and fights were held with bare knuckles.

And so when I was a district councillor, and traffic volumes made life on the road hard and dangerous for horse-drawn caravans, I got Jim and his family a permanent campsite in a small Green Belt meadow, where his son still lives today. When he died, I even had the privilege of speaking at his funeral.

But times have changed - and we are all paying the price. Just this week, for example, it was revealed that evicting travellers from Europe's largest illegal camp, at Crays Hill in Essex, will cost £3.5million. Currently, 90 families occupy the former greenfield site.

It is clear that many of those who now call themselves 'travellers' are not real gipsies with a respect for age- old skills and traditions. They are just chancers and scroungers. And with them has come a rural crime wave. Indeed, theft has become so bad in my area that I can no longer keep diesel on my small farm. My storage tank was used like a self-service pump and then left to drain diesel all over the farmyard. One neighbouring farmer who had tired of diesel theft put water in his tank. And as a sign of appreciation a brick was thrown through his window as he was having supper with his family.

Too often the authorities do nothing. No wonder that when one traveller, who had wrongly parked in a disabled parking space, was challenged, he said: 'I'm a gipsy, I can do what I f****** well like.'

But now doctors are being told that travellers are not required to make appointments to see them, they can just jump the queue. And in Warwickshire, the police are taking political correctness to its ultimate extreme by having a party for 'travellers' to make them feel wanted.

But the biggest issue remains their illegal settlements. In many cases, travellers buy a field, and then, on a weekend or Bank Holiday, when the council offices are shut, they move in their diggers and set up a permanent site. They are often thrown up on the Green Belt land, and without planning permission. In Cambridgeshire, for example, a group of travellers sold their site, which had partial planning permission, to a group of newcomers from Ireland.

The original occupiers then moved off to start a series of new illegal sites, while the new owners illegally brought in several additional caravans, joining them to the sewer and overloading the system with engine oil, bricks and rubbish. Unbelievably, these travellers then expected - and obtained - council help to empty and repair the sewer, at a cost of £25,000.

So where are all of these new travellers coming from? Many are coming from Ireland - where, it should be noted, laws regarding the misuse of land are far more robust than in Britain. Recently, I spoke to a member of the Irish Garda (the Irish police) - and she was privately delighted that so many undesirables were crossing the Irish Sea. After all, in Ireland, illegal caravans and the misuse of land are covered by criminal law, which allows for immediate confiscation of vehicles and prosecution. In Britain, however, they are covered by civil law and prosecutions often involve slow, expensive legal action. On this basis, the solution should be simple - make illegal occupation of land a matter of criminal, rather than civil, law.

James Paice, MP for South East Cambridgeshire, tried to introduce such a bill in 2004 - and the Government wasn't interested. But that may soon change, if the politically-correct Ed Miliband can stir himself to address the concerns of some of his constituents. Oxbridge-educated Miliband was born and brought up in London, but represents Doncaster North in Parliament. And now four illegal Irish traveller sites have appeared on Green Belt land behind 16 houses belonging to Mr Miliband's taxpaying constituents. These 16 houses adjoin a main road, but the residents believed that they had secure Green Belt land behind them. Until Good Friday, when the travellers' caravans and diggers illegally moved in.

One of the travellers then contacted Yorkshire Electricity claiming that they were contractors working for Network Rail and needed urgent connection. Incredibly, before any proper checks were undertaken, electricity was quickly installed.

Despite efforts by the Doncaster planning department and Stop Notices being issued, it is expected that the Planning Inspectorate will soon make the sites legal. Once again, it seems the authorities just don't have the stomach to protect the needs and wishes of ordinary people.

Incredibly, as the rest of us struggle to pay our bills and Treasury coffers empty, the Government is even setting aside £100m for new gipsy sites. Forget consultation. Forget democracy. Forget the wishes of the people. This is government by centralised decree. And it appears to favour travellers.

The Government may claim that it is protecting everyone's human rights. But what about the rights of ordinary, decent people who are just trying to get on with their lives and don't want caravan sites springing up on Britain's precious Green Belt land? The Reverend Andrew West, a Baptist Minister from near the Doncaster site, is quite clear about the situation. 'The travellers know what they are doing. They are not an oppressed minority. They have money and they are abusing the system at the expense of other people. 'It is not right, and proper action should be taken.'

Proper action? Perhaps the Reverend West should buy a caravan and set up camp in the grounds of Chequers. You can bet that a different set of rules would apply to him.

SOURCE

Ulster sends its Gypsies back home

Nobody wants such a parasitical group. They are loathed in their countries of origin (such as Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic) and even Canada is now growing wary of them. Gypsy immigrants have also produced great rage in Italy

At the end of a potholed road lies the village to which a hundred Romanians are returning after fleeing racist attacks in Belfast and where their fear will soon turn to despair. Twenty hours of journey time separate Belfast, via Dublin and Budapest, from Batar but, surveying the medieval conditions in which the Roma live here, one might do better to take as a measure of distance not years, nor even decades, but centuries.

On the farthermost margins of the European Union a man’s legs and arms were smeared with dirt as he toiled to make bricks from straw and mud to build another room on his home. It was, he said, to provide somewhere to sleep for the dozens of naked children — some of them malnourished, all of them filthy — who were running and swooping gleefully through the scattered rubbish.

Elderly couples sat on upturned buckets and tired old horses pulled carts while older children rode scrap-salvaged bicycles. No sanitation, a rudimentary electricity supply and the background hum of hunger and hopelessness completed the picture. Just how terrified must the Roma families in Belfast have been to choose this over their imperfect lives in Northern Ireland? It is a question that, all week, has been troubling the few who have already arrived home.

Florin Fekete returned on Monday with his wife and two sons. “There is no work here. Life in Belfast was good, we had really good times but I could not risk my family’s lives. I asked some of the ones who were attacking us, ‘What do you have against us?’. “The reply was, ‘We hate you because you are gypsies’. But even though I am afraid, I want to go back. Is it safe now, do you think?”

A 21-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy have been charged in relation to the attacks, which began more than two weeks ago and which prompted the Romanians to seek sanctuary inside a south Belfast church. It has since had its windows smashed.

In spite of a personal appeal not to leave by Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister, the Roma could not be persuaded by his argument that their tormentors were a “tiny unrepresentative group of racist criminals”. They moved on. Voices on local radio chat shows might, had they heard them, have convinced them they were right to do so: some callers said they should never have been in Belfast in the first place.

The cancer of sectarianism, which fuelled decades of violence, is now, as foreigners arrive in greater numbers, embracing racism. A report by the University of Ulster in 2007 made the astonishing claim that Northern Ireland has the highest proportion of bigoted people in the Western world.That was supported by an Equality Commission study this week that found that nearly a quarter of people in the province object to having a migrant or a gay person as a neighbour.

In Romania, the images of the Roma families under police protection have elicited little comment. One journalist said: “It’s not so important. People here don’t have a lot of sympathy for the Roma.” In Oradea, a border city near the villages where the Roma live, people refused to even describe them as Romanians. “They are not like us — just look at them,” said one smartly dressed woman.

Mr Fekete observed that his Government had done nothing to help them and that it was Northern Ireland’s politicians who gave them temporary secure housing and paid their fares home. “The Belfast people were great while our own Government did nothing. We only go there to work because we are poor and here there is nothing for us. But we were attacked so we had to leave,” he said.

What made Belfast such an attractive place? “Houses are cheap, we could rent them for £350 a month. Then we could earn £45 a day selling newspapers and working at a car wash. Our children could go to school and the churches were very good.” There has been traffic between Belfast and Batar for at least four years. A man called Virgil explained that the money the Romanian state pays for childcare — about £4 a month per child — would be saved up and used to pay for the journey. Once there, and with an established extended family network in place, they sent money home....

“In Hungary a new paramilitary group is vowing to clear out the Roma and in Italy there was much violence last year. It starts with neo-Nazis but it doesn’t take a lot to take it mainstream. Maybe Belfast is just the beginning.”

SOURCE

Lack of NHS cash puts British bottom of league for fertility treatment

Couples in the UK have less chance of IVF treatment than those in Montenegro

Poor NHS funding of IVF means that infertile British couples are among the least likely in Europe to receive the treatment they need to start a family, new official figures have shown. The latest European league table of access to fertility treatment has placed Britain 11th of 13 countries providing data for 2006, with only Germany and Montenegro providing fewer cycles of IVF in proportion to their population.

Infertile couples in Denmark and Belgium, which finish first and second in the table, are more than three times more likely to have IVF than those living in Britain, the new figures collected by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology show. While Denmark conducts 2,337 IVF cycles per million inhabitants and Belgium conducts 2,187, Britain conducts just 729.

The UK’s performance reflects a lack of funding for IVF on the NHS. While the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommends that primary care trusts should offer three free cycles of treatment to most infertile couples, only a quarter meet this standard. In 2006 only nine of the 161 trusts in England and Wales offered three free cycles. Many trusts also impose further restrictions, such as refusing to fund treatment when people have children from a previous relationship, and the NHS will only pay when women are under the age of 40. In Denmark and Belgium, up to six cycles of IVF are reimbursed by the state. Other leading performers in the league table, such as Iceland, Finland and Sweden, also offer more generous funding than the UK.

Clare Lewis-Jones, chief executive of the patient group Infertility Network UK, said: “We are angry that although the UK pioneered infertility treatment, we are still among the lowest providers in Europe, and these figures show that availability in the UK is less than one third of that in Denmark. “To be so far behind other countries in Europe in the provision of fertility treatment is totally intolerable. “Although there has been an improvement recently in the provision of treatment by some PCTs, there still remains considerable variation in the criteria used to determine whether or not couples can access treatment.”

Anders Nyboe Andersen, of Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, who led the research and presented it today at the ESHRE conference in Amsterdam, said that while funding was a major explanation for different countries’ performance, it was not the only one.

More here

Scotland: Police warn Orange Marchers

The Orange marches are a traditional celebration of the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism. Specifically, they commemorate the Battle Of The Boyne in Ireland in 1690, hence the famous Orange refrain: 'King Billy slew the Papish crew at the battle o'Boyne Water.' I wonder are they allowed to sing that these days? The marches are held in both Northern Ireland and in Scotland but rarely elsewhere

Strathclyde Police have warned that they will not tolerate "sectarian behaviour" at the annual Orange Order parade in Glasgow this weekend. About 8,000 marchers from 182 lodges across the city are expected to take part in Saturday's parade.

Police said their warning over possible sectarian behaviour had the backing of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland. Assistant Chief Constable John Neilson said: "Whilst the parade will have a major impact on traffic in the city centre, the main issue for the force and members of the public is the excessive drinking and public nuisance caused by those who follow the parade.

"We want to make sure people can come into the city centre without too much disruption or feeling intimidated by excessive drunkenness and sectarian or disorderly behaviour. "By all means follow the march, but note that drinking in public places is not allowed and officers will make full use of anti-social behaviour fixed penalty tickets to tackle the consumption of alcohol and urinating in public places."

Ian Wilson, Grand Master of the Orange Order, said he wanted spectators to "enjoy the music and the pageantry in a carnival atmosphere". "We do not wish anyone's enjoyment spoiled by the antics of boozed-up foul-mouthed followers," he said. "There is no place in our celebration for public drinking, abusive behaviour or offensive chants."

SOURCE

Finally: Lionheart’s Been Let Go

Lionheart sent an email the other day with a link to his post about being free, finally, from the threat of charges of “racism” and a possible jail term. Was it the police or the CPS who decided to stop harassing him? He didn’t say, but I’m glad it’s over.

Here’s a snip from his post:

I have been on police bail for 18 months on suspicion of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ through written material on this blog.

When my impending arrest first came about, I was in America and was advised by several American organisations and respected individuals that I should apply for political asylum there, but decided after speaking to my lawyer Mr SBLM…that the best plan of action was to return to Britain and go through the motions of arrest and interrogation.

I was arrested, interrogated, then released and have spent the last 18 months backwards and forwards on police bail, awaiting the CPS to decide whether or not they were going to charge me and put me on trial for my words.

My next bail date was Friday 3rd July, but I have just received news from my solicitor that all charges against me have been dropped, so there is no case to answer over my blog.

While he was in America, a Good Samaritan gave him a place to live. The Baron was working then, so we donated a small monthly stipend for a while until his situation was such that he was able to work…which depended on his being granted asylum.

That avenue was investigated but looked perilous. It might take years for them to process his case, during which time he would be in limbo.

If memory serves, it was March 2008 or thereabouts when he decided to return to the UK.

I was most upset. My main concern (my only concern, really) was the chance of his being jailed in a prison population full of those who would kill him without thinking about it. But Lionheart’s decision to go home was his to make, though I was sure he wouldn’t survive. He flew back to the UK, leaving a few heavy hearts behind.

I am glad that this trial by fear is over. What the police did to him during that year and a half of mental torture with the prospect of jail hanging over him was cruel and unnecessary. Lionheart had been chased out of his home neighborhood by Pakistani drug dealers because he dared to stand up to them, especially on the issue of enslaving young women.

On his blog, he described what they’d done to his neighborhood, his home, and his business. As a result of what he wrote, the Pakistani drug thugs filed a complaint against him for racism. It was this complaint for which he was to be “investigated” by the Hate Crimes Unit from Christmas 2007 until this week.

I learned a lot while Lionheart was here and after he went home. First and foremost and most unfortunate was my education about the UK police. I heard the tapes of them talking to Lionheart and it was eerie. They had no idea where he was, claiming they thought he was in Scotland. They didn’t seem to care one way or another about his possible fate if he came in to be interrogated. They just kept repeating, in a kind of bored tone, that he needed to present himself in order to be questioned. They refused to grant him safety of any kind. Their conversation with him was so cool, casual, unconcerned. The whole thing was straight out of Kafka.

I also learned that real Brits cared what happened to him even if the police and the judicial system didn’t give a fig. When he got home, he was given a place to stay. Legal counsel was obtained. People helped him.

Another lesson was a deep understanding of the tenacious bulldog character of the English. Lionheart could not be budged from a position once he’d decided on a course of action. Churchill had nothing on Lionheart when it came to digging in his heels and preparing to stand his ground! Here he is, eighteen months later, having survived his ordeal, still trying to make people pay attention to his original concern about his country:

Freedom of Speech has won, over the politically correct brigade who have tried silencing me, and members from their pet project British Islam who have wanted me prosecuted and silenced from speaking out against them and their religion. British Islam is a threat to every man, woman and child upon the British Isles, based upon 1400 years of experience and knowledge, and people like me, have a right and responsibility to talk about it openly, freely and honestly without fear of state persecution, prosecution or imprisonment.

May God bless each and every person who has supported me over the past 18 months, and beyond.

The battle for the heart and soul of Great Britain has begun!

Bloody but unbowed, that’s Lionheart. He gives me hope for England.

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If the British Government won’t learn, nor will children

In the new schools White Paper the need to impart basic knowledge has been obfuscated by jargon and dangerous guff

It would be nice if education ministers had take the five-year MoT they propose for teachers — if any stayed long enough in the job. There’s definitely something wrong with the steering in the Education Department. This week’s Schools White Paper left me bewildered. I am a diligent student of bureaucratese, but I couldn’t decide if it was dangerous or anodyne, a U-turn or a bunny hop — until I realised that an important component seemed to have fallen off.

Education, it seems, is no longer primarily about the transfer of knowledge. According to the White Paper, education is about pupils developing a “sense of responsibility for themselves, their health, their environment and society”, a “respect and understanding for those of different backgrounds” and “skills for learning and life”.

There is nothing much wrong with any of these. But it is hard to see how they, or any of the new quangos that litter the document, will make up for our failure to impart basic knowledge to enough children. The guide for children and young people (ugh) with the White Paper opines that “your health and happiness matter as well as maths and English”. There is no suggestion that health and happiness might depend on acquiring basic competence in those subjects.

I dug out the 2005 Schools White Paper, written when Lord Adonis was still driving common sense and ambition into the department. The 2009 paper is called “A commitment from the Children’s Plan: your child, your schools, our future”, and says that it is about “pupil entitlement”. The 2005 model was called simply “Higher Standards: better choice for all”, and aimed “to ensure that every school delivers an excellent education”. It talked about giving schools freedom to innovate, letting parents and others set up new schools, and making local authorities commission, not provide, education. It was written with logic and clarity.

The change is profound. Today’s well-meaning guff is most dangerous to those children whom ministers most want to help: the ones whose families don’t own books and won’t be supplementing their happiness hour with a private tutor. The ones assumed to be capable of “engaging” only with SpiderMan, not Michelangelo. Who, if they have the misfortune to be curious about the world, to want to step beyond the confines of what they already know, may become convinced that school is pointless. And may be right.

Those who feel most strongly about this are those who teach the most deprived. At a conference staged by the Hackney Learning Trust this week, two researchers presented compelling evidence from the US that raising the expectations of poor children is the most important factor in turning low-performing schools into high-performing ones. Hackney, which escaped the dead hand of its local education authority seven years ago, has broken the link between deprivation and poor performance.

Greg Wallace, head of Woodberry Down Community Primary School in Hackney, says that lecturing on emotional development “can do more harm than good”. Most of his pupils are on free school meals and a quarter are refugees. The school overcame hostility to refugees, Mr Wallace says, by teaching inference, deduction, reading and setting texts that helped other pupils to empathise with their plight, not by making them “pass bags around a circle and talk about how they feel”.

In six years the school has gone from being rated very weak to outstanding. The critical factor has been raising expectations. It considers some government measures of achievement, such as Level 4 SATs, are too low. It ditched the national literary strategy for synthetic phonics in 2002, because it wanted all its children, not just 80 per cent, to be able to read.

If such a school can surpass all expectations, why are ministers so keen to entrench failure? In the past two years, most comprehensives have given up offering separate chemistry, physics and biology because the Government endorsed a combined science GCSE. While independent schools increasingly opt for rigorous international exams, state schools get dumbed-down exams and Ed Balls’s new “diploma”.

As new Labour trickles away, it leaves Britain with one in five 11-year olds below the required standard in literacy, more independent school pupils getting three As at A level than in the entire state sector and the country falling back shamefully in many international league tables. But in the new order of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, standards and international scores have apparently risen. And schools offer the hope of solving the myriad social problems that the department thinks as important as education. The department now believes that “no school can meet the needs of all its pupils alone”. To solve social problems they must work in partnership with other schools and agencies, including new children’s boards and multi-agency teams.

I strongly believe that the mania for multi-agency working was central to the death of Baby P and fails other children — the bureaucracy sucks good people into meetings and saps them of responsibility. So I read the new acronyms in this paper with mounting despair. Good teachers do not speak this language, which is essentially the language of failure.

Even the proposed five-year MoT for teachers is a limp measure. Mr Wallace says that good heads do not wait five years to spot a bad teacher — they do it in six weeks. Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said yesterday that 13 per cent of trainee primary teachers were being allowed to resit basic literacy and numeracy tests three or more times, an astonishing figure. The Tories will set a higher bar for teacher training — in other words, weed out bad trainees before they enter classrooms. But that kind of ambition and logic has departed this Government.

The new ministers seem to have learnt nothing from the successes of the most disadvantaged schools. The danger is that pupils will learn nothing either.

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Church of England bishop Nazir-Ali tells homosexuals to 'change and repent'

He could be prosecuted for this under British law but that would make the law look the ass that it is so it won't happen.

"A Church of England Bishop has called for homosexuals to 'repent and be changed' at the annual Gay Pride London march yesterday. The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, made the controversial comments at the event, attended by Sarah Brown, the Prime Minister's wife.

Dr Nazir-Ali told The Sunday Telegraph: 'We want to uphold the traditional teaching of the Bible. We believe that God has revealed his purpose about how we are made. 'People who depart from this don't share the same faith. They are acting in way that is not normative according to what God revealed in the Bible. 'The Bible's teaching shows that marriage is between a man and a woman. That is the way to express our sexual nature.

'We welcome homosexuals, we don't want to exclude people, but we want them to repent and be changed.'

SOURCE

Sad when it takes a bishop of Pakistani origin to preach the Gospel within the Church of England. The church as a whole just dithers on the issue and their American branch (Episcopalians) thinks the Bible is just a quaint old book.

2009-07-05T00:25:00.001+11:30

British schools bar parents from sports day... to keep out paedophiles

Parents were banned from attending an inter-school sports day to protect pupils from kidnappers and paedophiles. The host school said they could not prevent 'unsavoury' characters from sneaking in.

More than 270 pupils from four local primaries took part in the East Beds School Sports Partnership Athletics Day at Sandy Upper School in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire last week. Youngsters aged seven and eight competed in the long jump, hurdles, sprint, 400 metres and relay races. Their parents, many of whom wanted to take time off work to attend, condemned the ban.

One mother, who did not wish to be named, said: 'They said they just could not estimate how many parents were going to be there, and were worried that they couldn't stop someone who shouldn't be there from being there. But I think it's just health and safety gone mad.' Mother-of-three Emma Collett, 33, of Biggleswade, has a child at St Andrew's Lower School in the town. She said: 'I would have taken time off work to support my child. It would have meant a lot to me. 'I'm all for measures to protect the safety of children but lines must be drawn and common sense must prevail.'

Paul Blunt of the East Bedfordshire School Sports Partnership, which ran the event, said the 'ultimate fear' was that a child could be abducted. He said: 'If we let parents into the school they would have been free to roam the grounds. All unsupervised adults must be kept away from children. 'An unsavoury character could have come in and we just can't put the children in the event or the students at the host school at risk like that. 'The ultimate fear is that a child is hurt or abducted, and we must take all measures possible to prevent that.'

Mr Blunt confirmed he had received a complaint from an irate mother but defended his decision. He added: 'None of the children taking part attend the host school so it would've been really hard to police. 'We did a risk assessment and concluded that we couldn't guarantee the children's safety. 'The number of children involved meant it would have been hard to ensure people were who they claimed to be.'

Local councillor Anita Lewis also backed the decision, saying: 'The safety of the children is paramount. 'It was decided that following a risk assessment we could not adequately supervise up to 100 plus adults on the school site.'

However, Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said it was 'totally unreasonable' to ban parents from a sports day. 'It's clearly a serious misjudgement. One of the great pleasures of sports day is that their parents can watch them take part,' he said. 'If you followed the thinking of this ban you wouldn't be able to let you child out of the front door.'

SOURCE

A pipedream of six turbines a day until 2020

Lord Hunt has made one of the most absurd claims that can ever have been uttered by a British minister, writes Christopher Booker

Last Wednesday, two days before our Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, told us that motorists could help save the planet by changing more quickly to a lower gear, his underling Lord Hunt made one of the most absurd claims that can ever have been uttered by a British minister. Solemnly reported by the media, he said that by 2020 he hopes to see thousands more wind turbines round Britain's coasts, capable of producing '25 gigawatts (GW)" of electricity, enough to meet "more than a quarter of the UK's electricity needs".

In three ways this was remarkable. First, as most of us know by now, thanks to the intermittency of the wind, the actual output from 25GW of turbine capacity would only average out at 7.5GW. Since Britain's peak demand is 56GW, Lord Hunt's turbines would meet barely a seventh of our needs, just over half what he claims.

Nor did he mention their cost. Thanks to the British Wind Energy Association telling us that the current price of offshore turbines is £3.1 million per megawatt, the bill we would all have to pay for Lord Hunt's dream would be £77 billion, plus the £15 billion that he did admit would be needed to pay for cabling to connect his windmills to the grid. For the same £92 billion we could build 34 nuclear power stations, enough to meet all Britain's needs, at a seventh of the cost for each unit of electricity.

The second remarkable feature of Lord Hunt's vision is that, in practical terms, there is no conceivable way it could happen. To build the 10,000 turbines that would be required by 2020 would mean installing more than two of these 2,000-ton monsters, the size of Blackpool Tower, every day for the next 11 years. But, thanks to weather conditions at sea, it is only possible to carry out the work for four months each summer. So the true rate would be more like six a day. Nowhere in the world has anyone managed to instal more than one a week, as opposed to Lord Hunt's hypothetical 45.

The third, perhaps most disturbing point is that the media dutifully reported Lord Hunt's absurd claims without asking any of the elementary questions that could have revealed that he was talking utter nonsense. One cannot of course expect Opposition MPs to take an intelligent interest in such matters. But if journalists allow ministers to get away with talking such tosh, the slide into unreality can only continue.

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Homophobia claim stokes war of words between the Tories and Labour

Both Left and Right in Britain are competing to support homosexuality

A furious political row over homophobia intensified last night when the Conservatives accused two openly gay ministers of “stirring up hatred and division” after they claimed that many Tory MPs were homophobic. As up to a million people prepared for the Gay Pride march in London today, Ben Bradshaw, the Culture Secretary, sparked outrage by declaring that “a deep strain of homophobia still exists on the Conservative benches”. Chris Bryant, the Foreign Office minister, added: “If gays vote Tory, they will rue the day very soon.” Harriet Harman, the Leader of the Commons, also weighed in, saying that David Cameron’s apology this week for the Conservative attitude on Section 28 was 25 years too late.

Alan Duncan, one of two gay Shadow Cabinet ministers, accused Mr Bryant and Mr Bradshaw of “stirring up hatred and division”. He said: “I have publicly paid tribute to Tony Blair for his achievements, particularly on introducing civil partnerships. David Cameron this week said that on Section 28 we had to admit we got it wrong. The party has changed. I bet in Labour backwaters there are plenty of people who don’t like the fact that Ben Bradshaw is gay.”

The Conservatives are keen to stress that their prospective election candidates include a number of gay people, including the party’s vice-chairman, Margot James, and that the next generation of Tory MPs will be more socially liberal. In a survey of 144 prospective parliamentary candidates in winnable seats for the ConservativeHome website, 62 per cent said that same-sex couples should be given the same benefits as married couples, while 31 per cent disagreed.

Mr Cameron apologised this week for Section 28, the controversial law brought in by the Conservatives in 1988 banning local authorities from portraying homosexuality in a positive light. Mr Cameron, the first Tory leader to speak at a Gay Pride event, said: “I am sorry for Section 28. We got it wrong. It was an emotional issue. I hope you can forgive us.”

His words were described as historic by Ben Summerskill, the chief executive of Stonewall, the gay rights group, who added that the apology removed a major obstacle that had stopped many gay people voting Tory. However, Mr Bradshaw and Mr Bryant urged gay people to study Conservative voting records on issues such as gay adoption and hate crimes. Ms Harman, whose Equalities Bill would outlaw discrimination on the ground of sexuality, urged people to disregard Mr Cameron’s words.

She told Pink News: “I don’t think anyone should be fooled by the apology, which is already 25 years too late. It is not the view of the Tory party. They have voted against the Equality Bill. If they were sincere, they would support it.”

A survey by Jake, a networking group for gay professionals, found that 38 per cent of gay people questioned would vote Conservative, even though just 4 per cent said that the Tories were gay-friendly.

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British doctors punished over appointment times by patient survey

This is British bureaucracy at its most moronic. Doctors will just reduce the number of patients they see if this goes through. Britons will end up having as much trouble finding a doctor as they already do in finding a dentist. In Britain, an NHS doctor has a "list" and you have to be on his list to be treated by him. If this goes through, doctors will close their lists and, as the elderly who take most of a doctor's time drop off the list through death, he will soon have a smaller list and be able to see all of them promptly. Nobody wants to work for nothing, which is what the new system imposes. Socialist bureaucracy will be as destructive as usual.

People with no doctor will then flood hospital emergency rooms and then what will become of the bureaucratic "targets" there? Will 4 hour waits transmogrify into 4 day waits? Bureaucracy will have made the problem worse instead of better -- as usual. Another possibility is that doctors will spend less time with each patient, thus causing things to be missed and allowing problems to develop -- with the patient ending up severely ill in hospital when that could have been avoided. Once again the strain on the already overburdened hospitals will be increased

Family doctors will lose millions of pounds in funding because of complaints from patients over the waiting times for appointments. Most general practices around the country are expected to suffer losses — some as much as £25,000 — when the results of a survey are released today.

The GP Patient Survey, the first to financially penalise doctors who receive negative responses, is expected to cost practitioners more than £10 million and in the worst cases could force cutbacks such as staff redundancies.

The estimated cost to surgeries in Birmingham has been calculated at more than £1 million, while those in Northern Ireland and Wales are likely to lose similar sums. In Greater Manchester, about half of GP practices have been told they will lose up to £10,000.

The system, designed to encourage a better service from GPs, has been widely criticised for punishing some practices that need more help. Doctors have also raised concerns about being judged on a small number of responses and queried why just two of the survey’s 49 questions — concerning access to a GP in 48 hours and more advanced appointments — carried all the financial penalties.

In Scotland, where patient responses were processed last month, some practices serving more than 10,000 patients were hit with five-figure penalties as a result of the responses of only 50 patients.

Laurence Buckman, chairman of the British Medical Association’s GPs’ committee, said that the lengthy survey did not encourage responses, and a few negative patients could skew the perception of a good practice. This was particularly likely in inner-city areas, where high numbers of patients could not be bothered to respond. “Some practices are going to be very badly hit with huge amounts of money on the say-so of very small numbers of patients,” Dr Buckman said. “We know in England that there are going to be similar results as there were in Scotland. “If you reduce money, you are reducing the services, not improving them. Because of the way payment is geared you can only have the money taken away. We will be looking at thousands of practices that will be adversely, and in some cases, unfairly hit.”

Describing the survey’s flawed methodology, Dr Buckman said that most questions were angled negatively to seek out underperformers while none covered simple issues such as “how good is your doctor?” He said that the process “was so long that most people would just get worn out and give up”.

Practices that receive less than 60 per cent of positive responses to the two key questions would sacrifice all the money available as part of the Quality and Outcomes Framework, which pays doctors for achieving service targets. The BMA predicted an average-sized practice could face losses of £7,500, while larger lists could lose more than £10,000. Hundreds of practices are expected to appeal.

In Glasgow, 170 of 270 practices will appeal. GPs’ leaders in Scotland said that few practices had escaped losses entirely.

David Stout, the Primary Care Trust network director at the NHS Confederation, said that money taken from GP budgets would be reinvested by trusts in other services. He said that PCTs had discretionary powers to reduce the penalties if they felt that a practice had been treated unfairly.

“If it’s over-zealous then [the Government] will want to look at that in the cold light of day and if it needs to be re-examined it will.”

A Department of Health spokesman denied that the survey was flawed, adding that it had been agreed by stakeholders and would be an accurate reflection of patient perceptions.

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Mother falsely accused husband of rape because 'she wanted him out of her life'

But this doesn't happen: Any feminist will tell you that

A lying mother who cried rape to get her estranged husband 'removed from her life' was jailed for four months yesterday. Michaela Lodge's 'wicked' allegation against innocent Martin Lodge resulted in him spending 12 hours in a cell. Only after three months did the 45-year-old mother-of-three confess she had made it all up so she could pursue an affair.

Judge Rodger Hayward Smith said her 'calculated' behaviour had done a great disservice to real rape victims'. Sentencing Lodge, who admitted perverting the course of justice, he said: 'It was a wicked allegation that was pre-planned to hasten his departure from your life.' Lodge, of Braintree, Essex, was arrested after finally confessing she had lied in a letter of apology to Mr Lodge begging his forgiveness.

Last night her 54-year-old husband told the Mail being arrested left him 'totally humiliated' but that his wife, who he supported in court, had 'learned her lesson'.

Prosecutor Andrew Jackson told Chelmsford Crown Court Mr Lodge's ordeal began last November when his wife claimed he had raped her in the house they continued to share, even though they were estranged. Essex Police started a rape investigation and held Mr Lodge in custody for 12 hours and 49 minutes. He was released on bail after insisting he had gone to bed with his wife, but only at her invitation.

Two months later Lodge made a witness statement in which she said she did not want her husband prosecuted - but continued to maintain he had raped her. However in February she passed a letter to her husband, via her son Daniel, admitting the lie. It had 'a kiss underneath' his name on the envelope, the court heard. The letter read: 'I am so sorry about what I have done to you. My head was and is all over the place. 'I cannot deal with this any more, I need to put it right. When we went to bed we both wanted to make love and the fact is I lied to police about you raping me. 'I will say goodbye and hope one day you will be able to forgive me. I am so sorry.'

When arrested for making the false allegation, Lodge admitted she had lied. Mr Lodge was never charged. Marc Brown, defending, insisted Lodge had not acted out of malice or revenge and claimed she started having regrets almost immediately. He said: 'It was born out of a confused desire to remove him from the picture. She accepts it was an outright lie. She did what she did without thinking of the consequences.'

Lodge, whose three grown-up children are from a previous marriage, boasts on the Friends Reunited website that she loves 'nights in with a nice bottle of wine' and 'going out with my friends dancing'. Elsewhere she describes herself as 'bisexual', and has also posted photographs of herself in a short dress flashing her stocking tops.

She was jailed despite 'a magnanimous appeal for mercy' from her husband, asking the judge to spare her from prison. Last night Mr Lodge, a warehouseman who married his wife in 1994, said: 'When the police turned up I was totally gobsmacked. I couldn't believe what was going on. It was totally humiliating. 'But I really can't hold too much against her. Maybe I'm too soft - that's why I supported her in court. 'I think it's a very lenient sentence but I think maybe she could not have been sent to jail as I think she has learned her lesson.'

SOURCE

An old man with oldfashioned views

I don't at all agree with the views concerned but such views were perfectly normal in the 1930s and there is no doubt that they are still held by some today. I think they have a right to be expressed but I am fairly sure that he will end up in a British court over them. Though the authorities may be deterred by his high public profile

Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One chief, said yesterday that he preferred totalitarian regimes to democracies and praised Adolf Hitler for his ability to “get things done”. In an outspoken interview with The Times, the 78-year-old billionaire chastised contemporary politicians for their weakness and extolled the virtues of strong leadership.

Mr Ecclestone said: “In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done. “In the end he got lost, so he wasn’t a very good dictator because either he had all these things and knew what was going on and insisted, or he just went along with it . . . so either way he wasn’t a dictator.” He also rounded on democracy, claiming that “it hasn’t done a lot of good for many countries — including this one [Britain]”.

Instead, Mr Ecclestone endorsed the concept of a government based on tyranny. “Politicians are too worried about elections,” he said. “We did a terrible thing when we supported the idea of getting rid of Saddam Hussein. He was the only one who could control that country. It was the same [with the Taleban]. We move into countries and we have no idea of the culture. The Americans probably thought Bosnia was a town in Miami. There are people starving in Africa and we sit back and do nothing but we get involved in things we should leave alone.”

Mr Ecclestone, who plunged the Blair Government into a row about donations in 1997 after it emerged that he had given the party £1 million, has a reputation for being outspoken. Last month he said that Formula One needed a “black, Jewish woman who, if possible, wins some races”.

In 2008 he provoked uproar when he suggested racist comments directed at Lewis Hamilton on websites in the build-up to the Brazilian Grand Prix “started as just a joke”. However, he told The Times yesterday that he was deeply concerned when he saw fans “blacking up” to mock Hamilton, an act he described as racist.

However, his latest comments could prove deeply damaging. Claiming he likes “strong leaders”, such as Margaret Thatcher, Mr Ecclestone suggested that Max Mosley, his close friend, the president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), would make a good Prime Minister. Mr Mosley, the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, was recently accused by Formula One racing teams of being a “dictator”.

Mr Ecclestone said: “I prefer strong leaders. Margaret Thatcher made decisions on the run and got the job done. She was the one who built this country up slowly. We’ve let it go down again. All these guys, Gordon and Tony, are trying to please everybody all the time. “Max would do a super job. He’s a good leader with people. I don’t think his background would be a problem.”

Mr Ecclestone’s remarks last night drew a strong reaction from Jewish groups and politicians. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews said: “Mr Ecclestone’s comments regarding Hitler, female, black and Jewish racing drivers, and dictatorships are quite bizarre. He says [in the interview], ‘Politics is not for me’, and we are inclined to agree.”

Stephen Pollard, Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, said: “Mr Ecclestone is either an idiot or morally repulsive. Either he has no idea how stupid and offensive his views are or he does and deserves to be held in contempt by all decent people.”

Denis MacShane, the Labour MP and chairman of the all-party inquiry into anti-Semitism, and chairman of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, condemned Mr Ecclestone’s decision to align himself to a “growing” anti-democracy movement. “Of course democracy and the politicians are imperfect and full of fault,” he said. “But this fashionable contempt for the right of people to elect their own leaders is frankly frightening. “If Mr Ecclestone seriously thinks Hitler had to be persuaded to kill six million Jews, invade every European country and bomb London then he knows neither history and shows a complete lack of judgment.”

John Whittingdale, the Tory chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, said: “These are extraordinary views and I’m appalled that anybody could hold them.”

SOURCE

British immigration facts and figures

BY FRASER NELSON

As promised, here’s the full story of those immigration statistics that I obtained from the ONS. In our new e-world, I can pass on all the results to you – and they’re worth discussing. The figures show the extent to which Brown’s “boom” was a mirage built not just on debt, but foreign labour. Most seriously, we can see a deep dysfunctionality in the UK labour market. Our system keeps millions on benefits (never less than 5 million have been on some kind of benefits since 1997) while meeting the needs of expanding the economy with a limitless supply of industrious immigrant labour. This means that the direct link between a growing economy and combating poverty is broken – and this is a serious development that demands attention.

The ONS results are here, in a pdf*. The key finding: there are fewer British-born workers in the first quarter of 2009 than Q1 of 1997. The trend of employers preferring immigrants, which we saw during the boom, has become more marked still during the bust.

But if we zoom in on the last eight years, the recession simply exacerbated what had been an existing downwards trend of UK-born workers in employment while number of foreign-born workers in employment has soared.

Without a doubt, immigration has been the largest change of the Labour years – the ratio of immigrant workers has almost doubled in the private sector and the economy overall as the below graph shows. This means the UK’s the overall mix of immigrants is up there with that of America – a change not taken deliberately, or with any debate, but something that happened by accident and which ministers are still struggling to understand.

I count myself as a supporter of immigration. But there is no doubt that mass immigration has given ministers the option of ignoring our own unemployed. If we didn’t have this unending tap of motivated workers then Britain would be forced to confront the fact that so many of its workers are being incentivised to do nothing by the welfare state. Here’s what the benefit tally, including ‘hidden unemployment’, has looked like in the last decade – using the DWP’s definition of out-of-work benefits.

At no point in the boom did the number on out-of-work benefits fall below five million souls. Almost half have been on welfare for five years or more – and are, therefore, statistically more likely to die than to work again. As I say, were it not for immigration, we’d be forced to confront this problem or our economy would not grow. When I was a business journalist in the late 1990s, I remember writing stories about how bus companies were recruiting in homeless shelters because they couldn’t find the staff. The people in those shelters were being offered structure to their lives, from an employer forced by economic conditions to deal with the greater risk they pose. It was a sign of economic growth addressing social problems – as it should be.

But mass immigration has broken this link. It meant Gordon Brown could actually afford to keep so many million on benefits, as tax receipts were being generated by comparative newcomers. It was a lot easier than trying to reform welfare. Scandalously, that’s what Brown did. To my mind, it is the most contemptible failure of his time as Chancellor. He had the money, the economic boom, to sort out the welfare dependency that afflicts so many communities in Britain. But he took the easy, short term route. To use that analogy the Prime Minister is so fond of deploying, he walked on by on the other side. Why get your hands (and poll ratings) dirty with welfare reform when you can rely on immigrants to keep the economy growing and tax receipts flowing? And who wants to end up with disabled people chaining themselves to the railings of parliament, as happened when Blair tried welfare reform? Brown took the easy option. And his short-termism has condemned millions to worklessness and poverty who might otherwise have escaped it.

This matters for Cameron, because he will inherit Brown’s dysfunctional labour market – one distinguished by its striking failure to provide that now-notorious Brown slogan “British jobs for British workers”. What if, when the recovery comes, the economy just sucks in more immigrants and the huge surge in dole numbers is never properly reversed?

That’s why immigration matters. You can’t understand the UK labour market, or the pernicious nature of the UK welfare state, without it.

The Brown economic model has spectacularly failed to provide British jobs for British workers – this is yet another one of his empty promises that a Tory government will have to fulfill. But unless the Tories work out how employment, welfare and immigration are interlinked they will be destined to repeat the same scandalous failure of the Brown years.

PS All immigration data is from the Labour Force Survey, a Eurostat-mandated study conducted by the ONS which defines immigrant in its most basic sense – ie, ‘foreign born’. No categoriation is perfect, and this of course captures some Brits like Boris Johnson who were born abroad. I also exclude pension-aged people from the study - it's working-age only. The trend of pensioners returning to work is a topic all by itself.

*If asked for a password it is FraserNels0n

SOURCE See the original for links, graphics etc.

Ultrasound treatment offers new hope for prostate cancer patients

Men with early-stage prostate cancer could be treated with soundwave technology instead of surgery, leading to fewer side-effects, research suggests. A study of 172 men whose cancer had not spread beyond their prostate found that 92 per cent were free of cancer a year after undergoing the experimental therapy.

They were given general anaesthetic and treated with high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), which uses high-frequency soundwaves to kill cancer cells. Small amounts of tissue are heated up to a temperature of between 80C and 90C.

All the men in the study were day cases and 78 per cent were discharged from hospital in an average of five hours. The trial took place at University College Hospital and the private Princess Grace Hospital, both in Central London. The results were published in the British Journal of Cancer.

Men with prostate cancer are usually treated with surgery or radiotherapy. Surgery involves a hospital stay of two to three days while men having radiotherapy usually need daily outpatient treatment for up to a month.

The results published yesterday found that men treated with HIFU had fewer side-effects than those treated with radiotherapy or surgery. Fewer than 1 per cent had incontinence, none had any bowel problems and 30 to 40 per cent had impotence. Of men treated with surgery or radiotherapy, between 5 and 20 per cent usually suffer incontinence and half have impotence.

Hashim Ahmed, who ran the trial, said that the study suggested that it might be possible to use HIFU more widely in treating men with early prostate cancer with fewer side-effects in the future. “We don’t yet know for sure if HIFU is more effective than traditional treatments so it will be important to carry out further studies involving a larger number of patients, followed over a longer period of time to truly compare the long-term effectiveness of this treatment.”

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Using speech to cover up meaning

Below: Excerpt from a paper, signed by Sir Ken Jones, the former Chief Constable of Sussex and president of the Police Association. Do YOU understand what he is saying?

"The promise of reform which the Green Paper heralds holds much for the public and Service alike; local policing, customized to local need with authentic answerability, strengthened accountabilities at force level through reforms to police authorities and HMIC, performance management at the service of localities with targets and plans tailored to local needs, the end of centrally engineered one size fits all initiatives, an intelligent approach to cutting red tape through redesign of processes and cultures, a renewed emphasis on strategic development so as to better equip our service to meet the amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms, risks and opportunities.”

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When the incomprehensible gobbldegook was criticized, the police responded: "That’s how civil servants speak”. I don't doubt that for one minute.

2009-07-04T00:49:00.001+11:30

Protective father saved daughter from lung cancer after NHS doctors sent her home with antibiotics

Grateful Laura Hicks has every reason to listen to her father. When the twenty-year-old developed breathlessness and persistent coughing three years ago, her doctor said she had asthma and sent her home with antibiotics. But concerned father Stan Hicks refused to accept the diagnosis.

The osteopath sent his daughter back to the clinic with a letter insisting that she receive an X-ray. The scan revealed a tumour taking up two-thirds of her right lung. Miss Hicks, now aged 20, underwent six months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy to shrink the tumour which was then removed along with her lung and two ribs in 2007. Miss Hicks, from Midsomer Norton, in Somerset, is now cancer free.

‘There was something in the back of my mind that it was more serious, but I had so many things on at the time I ignored it because the doctor's diagnosis seemed logical,’ she said. ‘I was lucky that my doctor actually listened. You have to think that GPs see so many patients a day, and my dad sees me every day so he could tell things weren't right. ‘I wasn't shocked when they told me it was cancer as I suppose subconsciously I was prepared for it, but it has put things into perspective. ‘I listen to my dad more now, well on some things anyway.’

Miss Hicks was unable to sit her A-level exams while undergoing treatment but has now completed a foundation access course in economics and hopes to go to the University of Bath to study economics. ‘I can't walk very far and I am more prone to chest infections so I have to look after myself, but I did the Race for Life a few weeks ago,’ she said.

Mr Hicks, who is also an animal osteopath, said his medical knowledge and instinct made him question Laura's initial diagnosis. ‘There were certain symptoms that she had that concerned me and in my letter I mentioned a type of cancer that was not too far off what she was diagnosed with,’ he said. ‘Doctors have to work on percentages to some extent, and make a judgment on the likelihood that someone of Laura's age would have lung cancer because there was no reason for it.

‘The lesson here is not to be too complacent about persistent symptoms, people tend to ignore things but if the symptoms are maintained there is probably a reason for it.’

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Pre-nups finally recognized in Britain

British courts are so "generous" to women that marriages there are sometimes compared to prostitution -- so a pre-nup is about the only protection a husband has got against a predatory woman. What, for instance, caused Heather Mills to deserve £24.3 million after 4 years of marriage to Paul McCartney?

One of Germany's richest women won a British court case on Thursday upholding a pre-nuptial agreement that denies her ex-husband a slice of her fortune, in a ruling hailed as ground-breaking. Katrin Radmacher, 39, a paper industry heiress, and Nicolas Granatino signed the agreement in Germany before marrying in London in 1998 that stipulated they would not claim money from each other if they split.

A court last year awarded Frenchman Granatino 5.6 million pounds ($11.39 million) of her 100 million pound ($A203.5 million) fortune after they divorced in 2006 despite the agreement. Radmacher asked the Court of Appeal to overturn the ruling on the basis of the agreement, which was recognised in France and Germany but had not been legally binding in Britain.

In backing the pre-nuptial agreement on Thursday, Lord Justice Matthew Thorpe, one of three judges hearing the case, said courts should give "due weight" to such agreements when deciding future cases about dividing assets. He said he believed it had become "increasingly unrealistic" to regard such contracts as void.

The court also cut the earlier figure awarded to Granatino to about one million pounds as a lump sum, in lieu of maintenance. He will also receive a 2.5 million pound fund for a house to be returned to Radmacher when the youngest of their two daughters, who is now six, turns 22.

Radmacher said she was delighted with the decision, saying she and her ex-husband had made a promise about their financial arrangements, which had been broken when they split. "I am delighted that the court accepts that the agreement Nicolas and I entered into as intelligent adults before our marriage should be honoured," she said in a statement. "Ultimately, this case has been about what I regard as a broken promise. "The arrangements the court has ordered will enable our daughters to live comfortably when they are with their father, and that is the way it should be. "Nicolas and I made each other a promise and all I have been asking is that he be kept to it."

The couple's marriage reportedly floundered after Granatino, 37, gave up a lucrative job in the finance industry to become a low-paid biotechnology researcher at Oxford University.

Radmacher's solicitor hailed the ruling as a legal milestone, saying the court had recognised that such agreements made by couples were decisive in Britain. "Now, in a landmark judgment, three of the most highly-respected judges in the land have ruled that pre-nups can be decisive in determining the financial division on divorce," solicitor Ayesha Vardag said. "From today grown-ups can agree in the best of times what will happen in the worst of times."

The High Court ruled last year that it would be "manifestly unfair" to hold Granatino to the pre-nuptial agreement. The court also said then that the arrival of the couple's children had "so changed the landscape" that the pre-nuptial agreement should be set aside. But lawyers for Radmacher argued in the Court of Appeal that the freedom to agree a contract was "at the heart of all modern commercial and legal systems."

Radmacher had earlier agreed to pay off her former husband's debts of about 700,000 pounds ($1.42 million).

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Everything is bent to promote global warming -- even the size of sheep

Crazy stuff. Why? 1). Since there has been no global warming for 10 of the 24 years concerned, the explanation given fails its most basic assumption. More likely is that some imported pest has reduced the amount of forage available and that factor enhances the survival of smaller animals. 2). Most sheep in Australia run wild and do so in much warmer climates than St. Kilda -- and they are generally big healthy animals. By the logic below they should all be the size of Chihuahuas

CLIMATE change has caused a flock of wild sheep on a remote northern Scottish island to become smaller, according to an unusual investigation published on Thursday. The study explains a mystery that has bedevilled scientists for the past two years.

The wild Soay sheep live on Hirta, in the St. Kilda archipelago in the storm-battered Outer Hebrides, and have been closely studied for nearly a quarter of a century. The law of evolutionary theory says the brown, thick-coated ungulates should have got progressively bigger. Tough winters mean that bigger sheep have a better chance of survival and of reproducing than smaller ones, and eventually they would dominate in the flock's numbers. But in 2007, stunned researchers realised that the average size of the Hirta sheep, instead of rising, had been progressively falling.

The answer, British biologists said on Thursday, lies in climate change. A team led by Tim Coulson, a professor at Imperial College London, pored over data for the animals' body size and life history over 24 years. They found that the sheep were not growing as fast as they once did and smaller sheep were likelier to survive into adulthood instead of perishing as lambs. This gives smaller sheep a shot at reproduction, which means that the average sheep size has fallen - by 81gram per year on average.

Coulson believes that shorter, milder winters mean that lambs do not need to put on as much weight in the first months of life in order to survive to their first birthday, as they did when winters were colder. “In the past, only the big, healthy sheep and large lambs that had piled on weight in their first summer could survive the harsh winters on Hirta,” he said. “But now, due to climate change, grass for food is available for more months of the year and survival conditions are not so challenging - even the slower-growing sheep have a chance of making it, and this means smaller individuals are becoming increasingly prevalent in the population.”

Another factor in the sheep shrinkage is a so-called “young mum effect.” Ewes that give birth earlier tend to produce smaller sheep, thus adding to the smaller average size.

Man-made climate change is already having an impact on species in terms of habitat and migratory patterns. But scientists say it is hard to predict which will be winners and losers from the change, partly because of the complexity of separating out evolutionary pressures from environmental factors.

The new study, published in the US journal Science, could help, said Coulson. “Biologists have realised that ecological and evolutionary processes are intricately intertwined, and they now have a way of dissecting out the contribution of each,” he said. “Unfortunately, it is too early to tell whether a warming world will lead to pocket-sized sheep.”

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British council forced to drop fraud case against mother who 'cheated' to get son in school

Another episode in the battle parents in Britain have to get their kids into a safe school. Sending your kids to a school where other students (particularly blacks) arrive armed with guns and knives (and even machine pistols in some cases) is something most British parents go to great lengths to avoid. But the Leftist British authorities, with their usual hatred of success in others, do their best to force middle-class kids into sink schools. They send their own kids to private schools, of course

A mother accused of using a false address to get her son into a popular state school has escaped prosecution because of a legal loophole, the council who brought the unprecedented case against her said today. Mrinal Patel, 41, applied for a place for her five-year-old son Rhys at Pinner Park First School in Harrow, north London in January last year. She claimed on the form that she lived within walking distance of the school but after she was offered a place Harrow Council discovered that the address she submitted did not match that on her tax records.

Mrs Patel was due to appear in court next week but Harrow Council has dropped their case against her because they were unsure the Fraud Act 2006 would cover school admissions cases. Councillor David Ashton, leader of Harrow Council, said there seemed to be “a loophole” and they had withdrawn their action to avoid potentially hefty legal costs. “While we stand by the substance of our case, subsequent legal advice is that technical legal arguments over the interpretation of the Act could pose a risk to the success of the action,” he said.

The case will cast doubt on the power of councils to tackle the rising number of parents who cheat on their school admissions form to get their children into the best schools. "The difficulty is that there is no clear law of what sanction applies if parents puts false information on their application form,” Mr Ashton said.

Mrs Patel said she was relieved the council had dropped the case. “It’s been an extremely difficult ordeal and I’m happy to put the matter behind me,” she said. “I have from the outset denied the allegations and the council’s unconditional withdrawal of the proceedings confirms my innocence.” Mrs Patel said that when she made the application, she had been living at her mother’s address, within the school’s catchment area. She claims she was separated from her husband and had no intention of going back to her matrimonial home which is further away – but changed her mind four weeks later.

She acknowledged that she had wrongly stated on the application form that she had been living at her mother’s address for 14 years but said she had been under a lot of pressure at the time. "I still don't feel I have done anything wrong," Mrs Patel told Radio 4's Today programme. "My biggest mistake was that I didn't tell the council I had moved out [of her mother's flat] when I did. "When they rang to check with me and asked if I was still living there, I said no. “I totally understand how it may appear. I explained that to the council, I gave them my full circumstances. I was totally honest and truthful about them,” she said.

The school received 411 applications for 90 places available in September 2008. The council says it allocated places to children living closest to the school, up to a maximum distance of 0.685 miles.

Mr Ashton said; “This case was never about persecuting mothers who wish to do the best for their children. It was about defending the integrity of the school system against those who might seek to flout it. “We always seek to resolve issues over school admission by dialogue. However, we will continue to consider court action as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted.”

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2009-07-03T00:07:00.001+11:30

Trendy British teaching is 'producing a generation of history numbskulls'

A generation of teenagers know almost nothing about the history of Britain because schools are sidelining knowledge in favour of trendy topics and generic skills, a university academic has warned. Professor Derek Matthews, an economics lecturer at Cardiff University, was so concerned at his students' lack of historical knowledge that he decided to investigate by setting them five simple questions. Over three years, 284 UK-educated first-years took the test, which demanded basic knowledge the professor believes 'every 18-year-old should know'.

But just one in six - 17 per cent - knew that the Duke of Wellington led the British army in the battle of Waterloo. And only one in ten could name a single 19th century British prime minister. In total, the students answered just 26.7 per cent of questions correctly - just over one in five. Students with A*s or As in history GCSE fared little better, answering just a third correctly. Those with A-level history got just two in five right.

In a later report on the 'death' of school history teaching, Professor Matthews said levels of ignorance among the young were an 'outrage' that 'should be intolerable'. His finding was highlighted by Tory schools spokesman Michael Gove as he pledged to 'completely overhaul' the curriculum to restore a focus on knowledge and ensure pupils are given a proper grounding in science, maths, British history and literature. This would entail tearing up the Government's planned new curriculum for primary schools that merges stand-alone subjects into six 'areas of learning'.

Mr Gove also pledged a major shake-up of the education watchdog-Ofsted amid fears it is losing focus on academic standards. The body will be ordered to bear down more heavily on weaker schools and move away from inspecting schools for success in promoting 'well-being' and other 'fuzzy, fashion-driven, intangibles'. 'Under this Government we have seen a decisive move away from valuing rigorous subject teaching and education as a good in itself,' Mr Gove told the Prince's Teaching Institute yesterday.

Professor Matthews, who lectures in economic history, tested firstyear undergraduates reading history in 2006, 2007 and 2008. He recounted in his report how students in a typical tutorial had never heard of the Reformation and did not know what was meant by the term Protestant. One thought Martin Luther was an American civil rights leader. His students were probably in the top 15 per cent of their age group for educational success.

'This implies that, all things being equal, 85 per cent of my undergraduates' age group know even less than they do. 'In other words, we are looking at a whole generation that knows almost nothing about the history of their (or anyone else's) country.' He added: 'This is an outrage and should be intolerable.'

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Another NHS failure

'Thousands of Britons' travel abroad for IVF, research finds. Shameful for the country that invented IVF

Hundreds of British couples are travelling abroad for IVF treatment every month, says the first study to evaluate the extent of “fertility tourism” around Europe. Restricted access to fertility treatment on the NHS, the high cost of private therapy at domestic clinics and a serious shortage of donated eggs are driving couples to visit overseas clinics for help in starting a family.

Almost two thirds involve women over 40, who do not qualify for free IVF on the NHS. Britons are more likely than those from any other country to cite access to treatment as the chief reason for going abroad, the study reported. A private IVF cycle typically costs at least £4,000 in Britain — twice the amount charged in parts of Southern and Eastern Europe. IVF patients who need donated eggs are particularly likely to travel. Domestic donors are in short supply because of the removal of anonymity and tough rules against selling eggs.

Spain and the Czech Republic are prime destinations, due to laws allowing donors to be paid €900 (£765) and €500 respectively for eggs. British donors get no more than £250 in expenses.

The new figures come from a study that counted all overseas patients treated by 44 clinics in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland over a one-month period last autumn. The participating clinics performed 1,230 IVF cycles on overseas patients in this period, 53 involving British women. As the study ran only for a month, in a small fraction of Europe’s clinics, the true number of Britons who travel for treatment each year will probably run into thousands.

Françoise Shenfield, of University College Hospital, London, told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Amsterdam that she understood why couples might consider travelling, but they should know that foreign clinics were not regulated to UK standards. Many overseas doctors, for example, will transfer more than two embryos to the womb — a practice largely banned in Britain because of the high risk of causing hazardous twin and triplet pregnancies.

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The bitter fruit of Britain's politically correct policing

Britain's violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union, it is revealed today. Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa - widely considered one of the world's most dangerous countries. The figures comes on the day new Home Secretary Alan Johnson makes his first major speech on crime, promising to be tough on loutish behaviour.

The Tories said Labour had presided over a decade of spiralling violence. In the decade following the party's election in 1997, the number of recorded violent attacks soared by 77 per cent to 1.158million - or more than two every minute. The figures, compiled from reports released by the European Commission and United Nations, also show:

* The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU.

* It has a higher homicide rate than most of our western European neighbours, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

* The UK has the fifth highest robbery rate in the EU.

* It has the fourth highest burglary rate and the highest absolute number of burglaries in the EU, with double the number of offences than recorded in Germany and France.

But it is the naming of Britain as the most violent country in the EU that is most shocking. The analysis is based on the number of crimes per 100,000 residents. In the UK, there are 2,034 offences per 100,000 people, way ahead of second-placed Austria with a rate of 1,677. The U.S. has a violence rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, Canada 935, Australia 92 and South Africa 1,609.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: 'This is a damning indictment of this government's comprehensive failure over more than a decade to tackle the deep rooted social problems in our society, and the knock on effect on crime and anti-social behaviour. 'We're now on our fourth Home Secretary this parliament, and all we are getting is a rehash of old initiatives that didn't work the first time round. More than ever Britain needs a change of direction.'

The figures, compiled by the Tories, are considered the most accurate and up-to-date available. But criminologists say crime figures can be affected by many factors, including different criminal justice systems and differences in how crime is reported and measured. In Britain, an affray is considered a violent crime, while in other countries it will only be logged if a person is physically injured.

There are also degrees of violence. While the UK ranks above South Africa for all violent crime, South Africans suffer more than 20,000 murders each year - compared with Britain's 921 in 2007.

Experts say there are a number of reasons why violence is soaring in the UK. These include Labour's decision to relax the licensing laws to allow round-the-clock opening, which has led to a rise in the number of serious assaults taking place in the early hours of the morning.

But Police Minister David Hanson said: 'These figures are misleading. Levels of police recorded crime statistics from different countries are simply not comparable since they are affected by many factors, for example the recording of violent crime in other countries may not include behaviour that we would categorise as violent crime. 'Violent crime in England and Wales has fallen by almost a half a peak in 1995 but we are not complacent and know there is still work to do. That is why last year we published 'Saving lives. Reducing harm. Protecting the public. An Action Plan for Tackling Violence 2008-11'.'

The timing of the Europe-wide violence figures is a blow for Mr Johnson, who will today seek to reassert Labour's law and order credentials. In his first major speech on crime since becoming Home Secretary, Mr Johnson is expected to promise a concerted crack down on antisocial behaviour. He wants to set up a website to allow the public to see what is taking place in their neighbourhood, such as the number of louts who have been served with Asbos. Mr Johnson is also known to support early intervention to stop children going off the rails.

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Church of England school bans girl from wearing crucifix - but allows Sikh pupils to wear bangles

A school told a child to remove a Christian cross she was wearing even though it lets Sikh children wear bangles as part of their religion. Lauren Grimshaw-Brown was told to take off a necklace with a cross on it because of health and safety fears. But the eight-year-old's furious mother has accused the school of double standards because they allow children following other faiths to wear jewellery on religious grounds.

The mother-of-two says Lauren and brother Callan, five, have always worn crosses at St Peter's CE School in Chorley, Lancashire. 'We're a Christian family and my children wear the necklaces underneath their tops,' she said. 'On Thursday Lauren was told by a teacher to take it off because apparently they're not allowed to wear jewellery. 'I could understand it if it was a fashion accessory or a High School Musical necklace, but it's part of our faith.'

Mrs Grimshaw-Brown complained directly to the headteacher, Helen Wright, who referred the matter to the school's chairman of governors, Father Atherton. He upheld the ban.

Mrs Grimshaw-Brown added: 'I received a letter in my child's reading folder. It said that if she had been a Sikh child she would be allowed to wear bangles because it's part of their religion. 'I've got absolutely no problem with any other religion wearing bangles or another item of jewellery, but why can't my daughter wear a necklace with a cross? It's a church-led school. 'The necklace is designed to come apart if it snags. The school has suggested she wear a brooch but surely that's more dangerous because of the pin. 'Lauren was really upset by this and I feel very let down.'

The letter to Mrs Grimshaw-Brown said: 'The prospectus makes clear that jewellery may not be worn except for earrings and watches. 'This is because there have been incidents in schools where hooped earrings, bracelets and necklaces have caused injuries to children when caught in outdoor play or physical activity. 'The prospectus makes it clear that school will allow jewellery where it is a necessary part of the religious faith of the child, i.e. Sikh families must wear bangles as one of the "five Ks", the religious rules for dress.'

Mrs Wright denied there was any discrimination against people following a Christian faith. 'We do want children to be proud of their Christian faith, therefore we would like to encourage them to wear crosses,' she added. 'The best solution in this case for children to be kept safe would be for pupils to wear a brooch - in fact some children already do.'

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Genetic test to produce disease free babies

A “genetic MOT” which can help IVF couples screen embryos for hereditary diseases and have healthy babies could be available in the UK within a year. The technique, known as karyomapping, has the potential to spot virtually any inherited genetic disease. It can also pick up chromosomal problems that might lead to Down’s syndrome or prevent pregnancy. Scientific trials are set to begin on the groundbreaking technique, which has been developed by British researchers and which they believe could eventually even eradicate some inherited conditions like Huntington’s Disease.

But the move will spark fears that the technology is moving towards creating “designer babies”, because it could theoretically be used to screen out non-serious conditions or help couples have babies with “designer” traits such as blue eyes. However, its use would be heavily regulated in Britain and is likely to be limited to extremely serious inherited diseases.

The £2,500 procedure removes the need for geneticists to spend months developing a test for a specific gene mutation, a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Last year the first child in Britain was born free from a breast cancer gene which raises the lifetime chance of developing the disease to 80 per cent, after doctors used PGD. But only around two per cent of 1,500 inherited diseases can be identified in this way.

The new test compares defects in a couples’ genes with that of their embryo, and scientists believe that it can identify almost all known genetic diseases. Developed at the Bridge Centre in London, scientists have successfully proven that the test can identify 100 per cent of embryos with cystic fibrosis, clearing the way for clinical trials to begin later this year.

Gary Harton, from the Genetics & IVF Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, who will lead the trials, said he hoped to be offering the test to tens of couples by December. Embryos proven to be free from the disease are then implanted into the women using in-vitro fertilisation (IVF).

As well as diseases caused by gene mutations the technology can also detect those that come from abnormalities in chromosomes, such as Down’s Syndrome. Detecting problems in chromosomes can also reduce the chance that an embryo will fail to become a successful pregnancy. But the technology will not be able to eradicate most inherited diseases completely, the researchers behind the procedure said.

Professor Alan Handyside, from the London Bridge Fertility Gynaecology and Genetics Centre in London, who pioneered the technology, said it was right that patients should have access to karyomapping. “I believe passionately that it’s a question of patient choice,” he said. “These families know first hand what it’s like to suffer from these conditions. I don’t believe it’s for the Government or scientists and clinicians to debate. “The hope is that clinicians will be able to test embryos for specific genetic diseases and know that, with one test, they are transferring chromosomally normal embryos.” He added: “There are spontaneous mutations happening all the time, but at least now we can identify inherited mutations.”

However, he said that Huntington’s Disease, an incurable brain condition which affects around 8,000 people in Britain could be eventually eradicated because most mutations were inherited.

Prof Tony Rutherford, the chairmen of the British Fertility Centre, said that although the technology did raise the possibility of creating designer babies, those risks already existed because of previous technology such as PGD. He said: “One thing that is superb is that we are regulated (in Britain). The safeguards are there. “We are regulated; we’re not mad Frankensteins working away in our labs creating designer babies. We can only look for major disorders.” He added: “The big advantage of karyomapping is its reliability.”

The announcement was made at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) conference in Amsterdam.

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Icecream advertisement banned

We read:

"Regulators have banned an advertisement that showed a priest and nun looking as though they were about to kiss. The image was thought “likely to cause serious offence”.

The Advertising Standards Authority received ten complaints about the advert for Antonio Federici Gelato Italiano ice cream after it appeared in Delicious magazine and Sainsbury’s Magazine. In the picture, the priest was wearing rosary beads and holding a pot of ice cream above the slogan “Kiss temptation”.

The authority said the advert breached decency rules. “We considered that the portrayal of the priest and nun in a sexualised manner and the implication that they were considering whether or not to give in to temptation, was likely to cause serious offence to some readers,” the ruling states.

Antonio Federici said that it was a “tongue-in-cheek portrayal celebrating forbidden Italian temptations”. He added that it was significant that the image did not show the nun and priest touching, or kissing"

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2009-07-02T00:02:00.001+11:30

ROYAL SOCIETY: SCREW THE POOR & GIVE US THE CASH FOR GREEN RESEARCH

Consumers will need to pay more for energy if the UK is to have any chance of developing the technologies needed to tackle climate change, according to a group of leading scientists and engineers. In a Royal Society study to be published today, the experts said that the government must put research into alternatives to fossil fuel much higher among its priorities, and argued that current policy in the area was "half-hearted".

"We have adapted to an energy price which is unrealistically low if we're going to try and preserve the environment," John Shepherd, a climate scientist at Southampton University and co-author of the report said. "We have to allow the economy to adapt to higher energy prices through carbon prices and that will then make things like renewables and nuclear more economic, as carbon-based alternatives become more expensive."

Shepherd admitted higher energy costs would be a hard sell to the public, but said it was not unthinkable. Part of the revenue could be generated by a carbon tax that took the place of VAT, so that the cost of an item took into account the energy and carbon footprint of a product. This would allow people to make appropriate decisions on their spending, and also raise cash for research into alternatives. "Our research expenditure on non-fossil energy sources is 0.2% of what we spend on energy itself," said Shepherd. "Multiplying that by 10 would be a very sensible thing to do. We're spending less than 1% on probably the biggest problem we've faced in many decades."

He said that the priority should be to decarbonise the UK's electricity supply. Measures such as the government's recent support for electric cars, he said, would be of no use unless the electricity they used came from carbon-free sources.

Though the creation of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was a good move, Shepherd said: "We've had a lot of good talk but we still have remarkably little in the way of action." He cited the recent DECC proposals on carbon capture and storage (CCS) as an example. The department plans to legislate that any new coal-fired power station must demonstrate CCS on a proportion of its output. Once the technology is proven, a judgment made by the EnvironmentAgency around 2020, power plants would have five years to scale up to full CCS.

Shepherd said the proposals were not bold enough. "Really, it needs to be 'no new coal unless you have 90% emissions reductions by 2020'. That is achievable and, if that were a clear signal, industry would get on and do it. It's taken a long time for that signal to come through and now that it has, it's a half-hearted message."

A spokesperson for DECC argued that its proposed regulatory measures were "the most environmentally ambitious in the world, and would see any new coal power stations capturing at least 20-25% of their carbon emissions from day one".

Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary, said that a white paper due next month will lay out how Britain will source its energy for the coming decades. "This white paper will be the first time we've set out our vision of an energy mix in the context of carbon budgets and climate change targets. We have identified ways to tackle the challenges – we will need a mix of renewables, clean fossil fuels and nuclear and we're already making world-leading progress in those areas. It's a transition plan, a once in a generation statement of how the UK will make the historic and permanent move to a low-carbon economy with emissions cut by at least 80% in the middle of the century."

The Royal Society report will argue that energy policy has been too fragmented and short-term in its outlook, with a tendency to hunt for silver-bullet solutions to climate change. "That really isn't the case. What we need is a portfolio of solutions, horses for courses," said Shepherd.

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Chiropractic: A brave scientist and an epic court battle: How Britain's libel laws are threatening free speech

With his round, John Lennon-style specs and nerdish good looks, physicist Simon Singh is an unlikely hero. As one of the country's most acclaimed science writers, he has spent much of his 45 years cloistered in his Home Counties study penning Number One bestsellers on mathematical conundrums, code-breaking and the Big Bang theory. Turning his hand to alternative medicine, last year he published a book called Trick Or Treatment? that included a chapter on the history of chiropractic therapy (the manipulation of the spine to realign the back), which was invented by grocer and spiritual healer Daniel David Palmer in 1890s America.

Inspired by the 'miraculous' recovery of a deaf man whom he treated by manipulating or 'racking' his back, Palmer said that 95 per cent of all diseases are caused by trapped vertebrae. Suddenly, the therapy (which takes its name from the Greek word for hand) became a near-religion, with Palmer boasting he was a successor to Christ and Mohammed. He even practised vigorous 'racking' on his own children, which led to him beingrrested and jailed for cruelty. Palmer's ideas caught on and, in 1925, the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) was set up and several clinics opened specialising in the treatment. Chiropractors were able, it seemed, to cure a myriad of ailments and began to broaden their therapies. Recently, the association has said that even children suffering from colic, eating problems, ear infections and asthma can be helped.

However, many in the traditional medical profession view the therapy with deep suspicion. Though the General Medical Council and the Royal College of General Practitioners advocate its use - especially for back pain - some scientists say there is no evidence that chiropractic spinal manipulation is better than other forms of back massage. This has led to widespread debate in the medical world, with some doctors refusing to refer patients to chiropractors, claiming the treatment does not work and can even cause harm.

In his book, Dr Singh questioned whether chiropractors could really achieve the results they claim. Later, in a column in the Guardian newspaper, he went further, saying the therapies for children were 'bogus'. Unsurprisingly, he came under an avalanche of criticism and the BCA demanded an apology and a retraction. When it received neither from Dr Singh, it decided to sue him personally for libel.

Dr Singh's battle serves as a frightening example of what happens when a ruthless body tries to crush anyone who questions its power or expertise. The ensuing row has also shone a light on English libel law, raising the question of whether it acts as a barrier to critical comment and public debate.

On Singh's side are some of the country's most illustrious and influential luminaries of science, the legal profession and showbusiness. They include former Government chief scientist Sir David King, the geneticist Steve Jones, biologist Richard Dawkins, leading QC Baroness Kennedy, the actors Stephen Fry and Ricky Gervais, and comedian Harry Hill (a former doctor).

Pitted against them is the BCA, which won the preliminary round with a judgment last month in the Royal Courts of Justice by Mr Justice Eady, the country's most senior libel judge, who is responsible for a series of controversial rulings. Justice Eady's critics accuse him of creating, almost single-handedly, a privacy law in Britain as a result of his interpretations of the 1998 Human Rights Act, in which he invariably seems to give more weight to privacy than to freedom of expression.

Most notably, Justice Eady ruled in a case involving Formula One boss Max Mosley that it was wrong for the News of the World to expose his liking for sadomasochistic orgies with paid 'professional dominatrices', saying: 'I accept that such behaviour is viewed by some people with distaste and moral disapproval, but in the light of modern rights-based jurisprudence that does not provide any justification for the intrusion on the personal privacy of the claimant.'

In another high-profile case, he stopped a cuckolded husband selling his story to the Press about a sporting celebrity who had seduced the husband's wife. Adulterers, said the judge, deserve privacy like anyone else. Via a succession of such rulings, the judge has built up a formidable body of case law upon which public figures can rely when they wish to gag newspapers or publishers. As a result, an increasing number of foreigners have succeeded in using the English courts to launch defamation cases, even if they - or their claims - have little to do with this country. Indeed, so serious has this problem become that the U.S. Congress - worried about the freedom of expression of Americans - is passing legislation to provide its citizens with immunity from British libel courts.

No doubt Simon Singh bore all this in mind when the libel case against him started last month. But as he explained this week: 'The hearing was supposed to last a day and a half. The idea was to have a preliminary ruling on the "meaning" of my article, so that I would know exactly what I would have to defend at the subsequent full trial. 'However, Mr Justice Eady suddenly stopped everything and said he had made up his mind already. It was all over in a morning. 'First, he decided that my article on the Guardian's comment pages was fact and not comment. 'Second, he said that it contained "the plainest allegation of dishonesty...and accused them (the BCA) of thoroughly disreputable conduct". 'In other words, according to his ruling, my article said the BCA was deliberately dishonest in promoting fake treatments as a matter of fact. 'This is unfortunate. Although I feel that chiropractors are deluded and reckless, I was not suggesting that they are dishonest.'

Of course, Singh and his supporters (who believe that free speech - the very cornerstone of British democracy - is at stake) are furious. His position is made worse by the fact that, under English law, anyone accused of libel is deemed guilty until proven innocent, unlike the defendant in a criminal case, where the burden of proof is the other way round. This means that he must prove the accuracy of his comments, as opposed to the chiropractic association proving that he is wrong.

As he says: 'It falls to the unfortunate defendant to prove before the court, often at considerable expense, that their statement was accurate. Also, fighting a defamation action in a London court costs many, many times the average for the rest of Europe. 'This has the effect of turning the legal system into a high-stakes poker game in which having good cards is not enough.'

Dr Singh is applying to the Court of Appeal in the hope that Mr Justice Eady's judgment can be challenged. If he loses that application, he plans to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming under Article 10 that his own freedom of expression has been infringed.

Meanwhile, 10,000 people have signed a petition backing him. Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, a charity promoting literature and human rights, says: 'You know there's something badly wrong with the libel law when a serious scientific writer is dragged through the courts for something he didn't even mean to say.' He explains that Simon Singh's only mistake was not to define clearly what he meant by bogus. 'He did not distinguish between " ineffective" and "fraudulent" treatments, both of which might equally be termed "bogus". The real culprit here is the rich English language and the arcane law of libel.'

The former Government scientist Sir David King adds: 'It is ridiculous that a legal and outdated definition of a word has been used to hinder and discourage scientific debate. We must be able to fairly and reasonably challenge ideas without the fear of legal intimidation. This sort of thing only brings the law into disrepute.'

Professor Richard Dawkins, the eminent biologist and controversial atheist author of The God Delusion, says: 'The English libel laws are ridiculed as an international charter for litigious mountebanks, and the effects are especially pernicious where science is concerned.'

Moreover, Singh is not alone in holding sceptical views about the work done by chiropractors. A few weeks ago, the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint against a chiropractor who claimed he could treat children suffering from colic and learning difficulties.

Singh's backers have also lodged a formal complaint against each chiropractor working in Britain whom they perceive to be in breach of the advertising code over the treatment of children. Five hundred complaints have been sent to the General Chiropractic Council in the past few weeks. And, in a clear sign that the industry is worried, it emerged this week that another professional body representing chiropractors - the McTimoney Chiropractic Association (MCA) - has emailed its members saying they must beware of calling themselves 'doctors' if they are not properly qualified. The email adds: 'Remove all the MCA patient information leaflets, or any leaflets of your own, that state you treat whiplash, colic or other childhood problems at your clinic. DO NOT USE until further notice.'

In what is clearly a response to the Singh case, members of the MCA have also been ordered to close down their websites to protect themselves from a 'witch-hunt'. Even so, the Mail has discovered that some chiropractors are still continuing to advertise treatments for children. For example, a quick search on Google reveals the website of a busy clinic in the South of England proclaiming: 'A spinal check-up could be one of the most important of your child's life. With a healthy spinal column, a child's body can better deal with sore throats, ear infections, stomachaches, fevers and the hundred-andone other problems that often make up young life.'

As for the BCA, it is to continue the libel case against Singh. It has declared: 'In the course of this litigation, the BCA has disclosed to the courts a plethora of medical evidence showing that the treatments work and that the risk associated with the treatments is minimal, if, indeed, there is any risk at all. 'Dr Singh stated that the BCA promotes treatments that are positively dangerous. He cannot justify his stance and has not made any attempt to do so. Therefore, an apology continues to be sought, along with damages and costs.'

So what of the future for Dr Singh? He has already spent £100,000 of his own money to defend himself in the ill-fated High Court hearing that lasted just three hours. If he is not allowed to appeal, damages again him will be announced and could run into thousands of pounds more. No wonder he observes bitterly: 'There is something fundamentally wrong with libel laws that have such a chilling effect on journalists, whether they write about science or anything else. 'Even large publishers are intimidated by the huge expense of fighting a libel battle. Articles that should be defended are dropped, and articles that should be written are shelved before they are even published because of potential defamation action.'

Singh, who lives in Richmond upon Thames, Surrey, with his journalist wife, says: 'If I lose my case, it will only further discourage other journalists - or anyone else - from criticising individuals and organisations in relation to matters of public interest.'

He is not an easy opponent. He has a brilliant mind, has won an MBE for his services to science and is receiving determined support from a growing phalanx of experts, politicians, scientists, lawyers and celebrities. In this contest - which has gone well beyond the world of Daniel David Palmer's original 'racking' cure in 1895 - he is unlikely to go away quietly. As he says: 'I still believe my article was reasonable, fair and important in terms of informing parents about the lack of evidence relating to chiropractic treatment for some childhood conditions. I am determined to continue.'

Simon Singh may be a surprise figurehead for such an epic battle, but he won't stop until he has guaranteed that the principle of free speech - which is something about which judges such as Justice Eady seem remarkably nonchalant - remains at the very heart of our British way of life.

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Canterbury is sufficiently gay, council inspectors rule

One of Britain's most historic cities, Canterbury, has been told it is sufficiently gay – after a complaint sparked a two-month investigation costing thousands of pounds.

A government watchdog decided that Canterbury in Kent does enough to promote homosexual culture, rejecting a complaint by local activists. The Local Government Ombudsman – who asked for the city's council to provide evidence of how it supported the gay community – said it was satisfied the pink pound was being catered for.

As part of the investigation, the council had to prove its inclusiveness by giving details of "touring plays and musicals, for example, which would be of interest to the LGBT community". And it had to show that it had "put forward suggestions for small events that it might help fund, as well as proposals for other events such as exhibitions".

Rob Davies, spokesman for the council, said: "Obviously we're delighted with the outcome of the investigation. "We feel we do a great deal for the gay community in Canterbury and we have always tried to support various gay events and promotions." "But at the same time it is not the duty of any council to set up a gay bar – that's not what councils do."

The two-month investigation began at the end of April after a letter was sent from two representatives of Pride in Canterbury. Chairman Andrew Brettell lodged a formal complaint with the Local Government Ombudsman claiming his initial letter to the council in November fell on deaf ears. Mr Brettell, in his 60s, said last month: "We do not believe the council want a thriving LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community in our city. The impression I get is that the council just doesn't want to know.

"I get the feeling it is precious because Canterbury has a cathedral and history. I think they think the gay community will turn it into Sodom and Gomorrah."

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British teachers to be fired under new classroom licence plan

A good start -- but expect very weak-kneed enforcement

Teachers will need a licence to enter the classroom and face being banned if they cannot renew it every five years, the Government said yesterday. The radical move, in a White Paper put before the Commons yesterday, will be widely seen as an attempt to weed out incompetent teachers and to stop bad teachers being shunted from school to school. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, indicated that he expected some teachers to fail their renewal. “It may be that we will discover some teachers who do not make the grade, and some who aren’t relicensed,” he said.

Newly qualified teachers would get a licence to teach from September. All teachers returning to the profession will go through the process from September next year, and supply teachers will be targeted after that. Eventually all teachers will need a licence.

Experts have estimated that more than 20,000 teachers are not fit to do their jobs, with one or two in each school. Heads privately complain that it is virtually impossible to sack poorly performing teachers. Only ten teachers, out of a workforce of 500,000, have been fired for incompetence since 2001. Teaching unions attacked the plan for licences, saying that teachers already faced numerous accountability measures.

Mr Balls indicated his intentions in the Children’s Plan published in December 2007, in which he called on the General Teaching Council to root out teachers whose “competence falls to unacceptable low levels”.

Under the licence scheme, head teachers would provide written accreditation for teachers every five years, vouching for their ability, and the General Teaching Council would conduct an annual audit of about 5 to 10 per cent of teachers. The licence would go hand in hand with entitlement to professional development so that teachers could keep up with the latest teaching methods and technology.

Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “Teachers’ capacity and practice are persistently under review. It is not clear to me that head teachers will welcome an additional responsibility to relicense their teachers every five years.”

The licence was one of several radical reforms announced by Mr Balls in the White Paper. These include report cards, which will grade schools from A to F across a range of measures, including academic performance, children’s wellbeing and parental satisfaction.

Local authorities will also be forced to consult parents about whether they are happy with schools, and set out a plan of action if the results are negative. Parents will have to sign up to the school’s behaviour rules and reiterate this commitment each year. If it is breached, they could face a courtimposed parenting order or a fine.

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At last, the truth about "asylum seekers" going straight to the head of the line for British welfare-housing

The Government's announcement yesterday that they are handing councils new powers to give local people priority on the waiting list for social housing is a clear admission that they have been misleading us over the huge impact of immigration on housing. For years, they have been in total denial, refusing even to discuss how immigration has affected the supply of housing. Now, at last, they have acknowledged that this is an issue which must be tackled. Supply of social housing has fallen far behind the demand for it because waiting lists have grown by over 60 per cent in just six years.

One major reason for this is the number of asylum seekers who have been granted asylum - or other forms of protection which entitle them to remain in Britain - and offered social housing. Politicians frequently assure us that asylum seekers do not get social housing. This is true up to a point, as they are given private rented accommodation at public expense while their cases are decided. But as soon as they are granted permission to stay, they can go on the housing lists. Astonishingly, over the past ten years the Government has granted more asylum seekers permission to stay in Britain than they have actually built social housing for. So, inevitably, the waiting lists have got ever longer.

This is not to suggest that we should not provide housing to genuine refugees. But surely the Government should have provided for the extra housing demand that their own policies have generated.

So who on these bulging lists actually gets a council house? Currently, it is decided on the basis of 'need' which, in turn, is heavily influenced by family size. And once granted residence, a migrant or an asylum seeker can bring over his entire family and thereby move up the priority list.

Of course local working people have seen this happening for years in their own communities. They know perfectly well that the Government have not been telling the whole truth - but few were prepared to listen.

But a major study called 'The New East End', published in 2006, revealed the true extent of the problem. The researchers from the Young Foundation looked at what had happened in Bethnal Green in London's East End over the past generation. They found that the Whitehall concept of 'need' had, in practice, favoured Bangladeshi workers who were beginning to bring over their families.

Young British workers with smaller families were pushed out to Essex, away from their roots and away from their parents, who stayed put in their council houses in East London. The outcome was that family and social bonding between Bangladeshi families was strengthened - while the traditional working-class family structure of the British workers, especially the role of grandmothers, was severely weakened. The researchers found that the white working class were seething with resentment.

The Government rushed to assure their supporters that there was no truth in any of this, insisting that it was all down to scare tactics. Taking advantage of local resentment, the BNP started making inroads. In contrast to the major parties, they were willing to speak frankly about the issue - even if their solutions were distasteful. But when, in May 2007, the local MP, Margaret Hodge, remarked publicly on the advances the BNP was making in the local elections and suggested something should be done about it, she was jumped on by the Left of her party and told to shut up.

A report was subsequently commissioned by the then Commission for Racial Equality which conveniently concluded that there was no evidence that newly arrived migrants were being allocated housing in preference to UK-born people. But that was to dodge the real issue. The rules for allocating social housing might have been administered scrupulously. But it was the system itself that was unfair. Little or no credit was given for the length of time people had been waiting for housing, nor for the strength of their ties to the locality.

As a result, white working class people were indeed being leapfrogged by new arrivals with large families. That is the background to yesterday's announcement. Only now have the Government been forced into long-overdue action because their own supporters are deserting them in droves. But it is not just social housing that has been coming under such pressure because of immigration. All housing has been affected - yet the Government refuse to acknowledge this, let alone discuss it.

All over the country, despite deep opposition, planning authorities have been told how many more houses they must build. They have no idea how much of this is caused by immigration - and nor do the local residents. But Migrationwatch dug out the figure from the last line of the last table of a technical paper produced by the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister - and, astonishingly, it is nearly 40 per cent of all new homes.

This figure comes from the government predictions of new households which are issued every two years. The latest set shows that 252,000 households will be formed every year until 2031. They also show that without immigration, there would be only 153,000 households. In other words 99,000 households, or 39 per cent, will be caused, not by existing immigrants, but by future immigrants and their families.

Put another way, that is a requirement for a new home every five minutes for new immigrants over the next 23 years. This is an astronomical number. No wonder the Government avoid any discussion of it. As we face the most serious financial crisis for two generations and as the Government find themselves virtually broke, one has to ask, who is going to pay for all this? That is another subject the Government do not wish to discuss.

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Diet claim: Eating food with a high water content, like soup, can help reduce your calorie intake

Another stupid theory put forward without testing. I have no dobt that people will habituate to such a diet and end up eating larger quantities. See the article following this one

It gives a whole new, and rather more healthy meaning to the liquid lunch. Eating food with a high water content could be the key to losing weight. Nutritionists believe that dishes such as rice, pasta, soups and stews, appear to keep you feeling fuller for longer. But the liquid must be part of the food. Drinking a glass of water while you eat will not have the same effect, said the British Nutrition Foundation.

The theory is based on studies which showed that although somebody will eat different foods on different days, the weight of food consumed will hardly vary. This means that if we eat foods that are just as bulky but contain fewer calories, we should feel just as full.

Water-rich foods tend to be low in calories or have a low energy density, a BNF conference heard. A spokesman said: 'Studies have shown that people tend to consume the same weight of food each day but not necessarily the same amount of energy or calories. 'So it is possible to trick ourselves into consuming less energy, without feeling hungrier, by eating a lower energy density diet which still makes up the same weight of foods overall throughout the day.'

To work out the energy density of a food, divide the number of calories by its weight. So a 40g bag of crisps with 200 calories has an energy density of five – putting it towards the high end of the scale. At the other end of the scale are most fruits and vegetables, as well as vegetable soups, low-fat yoghurt, baked beans, baked potatoes and cornflakes. Many of these are high in water and all have an energy density of 1.5 or less, making them good to fill up on.

Foods with a medium rating include strawberries and cream, lasagne, steak, pizza and chips.

Joining crisps at the high end of the scale, with ratings of four or more, are cheese, chocolate, mayonnaise and butter. Chocolate-lovers, however, can take some heart. The lightness of chocolate mousse means it has a lower rating – and so is more filling – than squares of chocolate. Weight for weight, a low-calorie mousse has around a quarter of the calorie count as the solid variety, but, according to the BNF, should be just as filling.

Dr Elisabeth Weichselbaum, a nutrition scientist at the foundation, advised including 'more foods with a low energy density, moderate amounts of foods with a medium energy density and small amounts with a high density'. She added: 'For instance, if you make spaghetti bolognese and make the sauce with mincemeat it might be a bit high in fat. 'If you put a lot of veg in the sauce, you will probably eat the same amount of sauce but a lot fewer calories.'

The idea that certain foods make you feel more full than others is the basis of several popular diets. The Atkins Diet, for example, works on the principle that protein satisfies hunger quicker than carbohydrates. So dieters who fill up on steak and eggs lose more weight – and keep it off for longer – than those who tuck into similar quantities of pizza and potatoes.

The British Dietetic Association said it was a good idea to eat lots of fruit and vegetables but that meat, fish and starchy foods should also have a place on our dinner plates.

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Why those oh-so-healthy diet foods make us eat even more

On a diet but struggling to shed the pounds, or - horror of horrors - actually gaining weight? Well it could be because you're on a diet, according to scientists. A study has shown that when faced with a healthy, low-calorie dish, we instinctively increase the portion on our plate or feel justified in going back for second helpings.

Researchers at the University of Bristol discovered those on low-calorie diets believe you can't have too much of a good thing and end up consuming just as many calories as if they were eating regular dishes. 'A person's perception of how full a meal will make them feel will no doubt affect portion size,' said Lisa Miles, of the British Nutrition Foundation. 'It's so important to be aware of behavioural triggers for overeating.'

The Bristol team, led by Dr Jeff Brunstrom, looked at the responses of 76 adults to 18 foods and found they quickly learnt their calorie values and over-compensated accordingly. The findings back up a 2007 Canadian research paper on the causes of childhood obesity, which found that rats given low-calorie food also tended to over-eat.

In a second study, Dr Brunstrom found children whose parents regulated sugary snacks, such as chocolate or crisps, ended up bingeing on them when given a chance. The researchers tested 70 children aged between ten and 12 years old, presenting them with six unhealthy treats. A child who was rarely allowed the snack was more likely to over-estimate how much they should eat, miscalculating a 250kcal portion as a 120kcal one. Meanwhile, a youngster who had eaten the foods previously would be able to assess accurately how calorific it was, on average guessing that a 250kcal portion contained 230kcal.

Dr Brunstrom, a lecturer in experimental psychology, will present his work at a BNF conference this week. He said: 'These findings suggest that limiting access to certain snack foods limits learning about their properties. Thus, when snack foods are eventually encountered they might tend to be selected in larger portions.'

This could be bad news for parents who believe they are doing their children a favour by placing sweet treats off-limits. Tam Fry, chairman of the Child Growth Foundation and a member of the National Obesity Forum, said: 'Early in a child's life they need to be introduced to portion size as a positive measure, otherwise it becomes forbidden fruit. 'It isn't just the ignorant affected by obesity, it goes across all social classes.'

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British backdown on ID cards: "n a dramatic break with years of Labour policy, the new Home Secretary last night scrapped plans for compulsory ID cards. Alan Johnson said the scheme - which has already cost as much as £200million - would always remain voluntary. The project will now focus on persuading youngsters to pay £30 for a card so they can prove their age when trying to buy alcohol in pubs and bars.... Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling, who has vowed to scrap the cards, said: 'This decision is symbolic of a Government in chaos. They have spent millions on the scheme so far - the Home Secretary thinks it has been a waste and wants to scrap it, but the Prime Minister won't let him. 'So we end up with an absurd fudge instead. This is no way to run the country.'... Controversially, everyone who wants a card or a biometric passport will still have their details stored on the huge national identity register database. Civil liberties groups argue this still amounts to a compulsory scheme, as anybody getting a passport from around 2011 will have no option but to sign up... Plans for compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals remain unchanged. [Since British officials regularly lose huge database files on trains etc., there was no confidence that ID information could be kept secure]

2009-07-01T00:08:00.001+11:30

NHS children's emergency doctor high on gas

"Chahal" is an Indian surname

A DOCTOR inhaled laughing gas for "fun" while he was treating children in an emergency ward, a medical tribunal has been told. The paediatrician, Dr Jonathan Chahal, who work at Royal Liverpool Hospital in England’s north was found out when nurses overheard him giggling in a resuscitation room in 2007, the tribunal heard. The 33-year-old doctor then allegedly persuaded several nurses to breathe in the anaesthetic gas Entonox after telling them: "It makes me feel floaty."

The drug has a warning from manufacturers saying people should not use machinery for up to 12 hours after taking it, the General Medical Council was told.

The Daily Mail reports that the tribunal was told how nurses Christine Timmons and Siobhan Fitzgerald were on duty at 2pm on June 27 when they went into the resuscitation room and spotted Chahal taking Entonox. "There was a blue canister behind the desk and it made a characteristic hissing sound," counsel for the General Medical Council Craig Sephton said. "They were invited by Dr Chahal to sample the Entonox. "Siobhan Fitzgerald was on duty that evening at 9.15pm she was talking to a colleague when they heard the sound of giggling from the resuscitation room.

"They went in and found the doctor taking Entonox again. They got into a discussion and he asked them if they had tried it before. He said it was fun and made him feel floaty. He invited them to do it so they did."

Just days later two other nurses, Briony Routledge and Amanda Howe, were on duty at the emergency ward when they spotted Chahal using Entonox consistently throughout the night. Mr Sephton added: "He offered it to them and also offered it to a student nurse Helen Aspinall - two of them accepted Doctor Chahal's offer."

Chahal was later quizzed by bosses who asked about his use of "recreational drugs." He said he smoked cannabis as a student but otherwise nothing. But Mr Sephton said one doctor took hair samples from Chahal - tests of which showed he had taken cocaine.

The doctor denies his fitness to practise was impaired.

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Nutty old Lovelock is at it again

Climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age, apparently

We need a climate change 'Churchill' to lead us away from planet-wide devastation, writes James Lovelock in the latest edition of Conservation magazine. 'We have enjoyed 12,000 years of climate peace since the last shift from a glacial age to an interglacial one,' says Lovelock.

In a small way, the plight of the British in 1940 resembles the state of the civilized world now. At that time we had had nearly a decade of the well-intentioned but quite wrong belief that peace was all that mattered.

The followers of the peace lobbies of the 1930s resembled the environmentalist movements now; their intentions were more than good but wholly inappropriate for the war that was about to start. It is time to wake up and realize that Gaia, the Earth system, is no cozy mother that nurtures humans and can be propitiated by gestures such as carbon trading or sustainable20development.

Gaia, even though we are a part of her, will always dictate the terms of peace. I am stirred by the thought that Gaia has existed for more than a quarter the age of the universe and that it has taken this long for a species to evolve that can think, communicate, and store its thoughts and experiences.

If we can keep civilization alive through this century perhaps there is a chance that our descendants will one day serve Gaia and assist her in the fine-tuned self-regulation of the climate and composition of our planet.

We have enjoyed 12,000 years of climate peace since the last shift from a glacial age to an interglacial one. Before long, we may face planet-wide devastation worse even than unrestricted nuclear war between superpowers. The climate war could kill nearly all of us and leave the few survivors living a Stone Age existence. But in several places in the world, including the U.K., we have a chance of surviving and even of living well.

For that to be possible, we have to make our lifeboats seaworthy now. Back in May 1940, we in the UK awoke to find facing us across the Channel a wholly hostile continental force about to invade. We were alone without an effective ally but fortunate to have a new leader, Winston Churchill, whose moving words stirred the whole nation from its lethargy: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."

We all need modern Churchills to lead us from the clinging, flabby, consensual thinking of the late twentieth century and to bind our nations with a single-minded effort to wage a difficult war.

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CLIMATE CHANGE NOT A SECURITY THREAT: BRITISH DEFENCE DEPT. WITHDRAWS CLIMATE FUNDING

The UK's Met Office has had its funding for climate research slashed by a quarter, following withdrawal of financial support by the government's Ministry of Defence (MoD). The loss of £4.3 million (US$7.0 million) in funding from the MoD will affect the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, the world-class climate modelling institute whose researchers made key contributions to the last assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

"This news comes as a shock," says climate scientist Martin Parry, formerly at the Met Office and now at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. "The UK's core modelling work on climate change has been funded from this source, up to now." "Global and regional security will be threatened by climate change, and the MoD is hopelessly wrong to think it is outside its responsibility," adds Parry, who co-chaired the IPCC's working group on climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

In a statement, an MoD spokesperson said that the cuts, which will come into effect immediately, were made with a view to "prioritizing success in current operations, such as Afghanistan".

This will be the first time that Met Office climate research has gone without MoD cash, according to a Met Office spokesman. The office became an executive agency of the ministry in 1990 and a commercialized trading fund in 1996. By 2008, one-sixth of its budget of £176.5 million came from commercial services. But government, and the MoD in particular, has continued to be its main customer and funder.

In 2007, the MoD signed a three-year deal worth £12 million with the Met Office, to part-fund its Integrated Climate Programme (ICP), which makes up the bulk of its climate research. Although the MoD has withdrawn its remaining funding, a Met Office spokesman insisted that the programme is not threatened. The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is committed to providing £4 million per year in funding up until 2011 to ICP, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will provide approximately £10 million in annual funding over the same period.

The Met Office is now in negotiations with these departments, and with the Department for International Development (DfID), in an effort to recoup some of the lost funding. "If they don't recoup it, they are going to be in serious trouble," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. "Losing 25% of your funding is a huge deal. Five percent is generally containable, but 25% is not an amount you can hope to absorb easily."...

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Composting is bad for your health

Giant compost heaps used to recycle garden waste and leftover food could be harming the health of those living nearby, experts have warned. Researchers fear the industrial-scale sites increase rates of asthma, respiratory infections and skin complaints among locals unless they are correctly regulated.

There are already nearly a hundred commercial composting facilities in the UK, handling more than 1.7million tons of waste per year. The number is expected to double as councils scramble to meet Government targets for recycling organic household waste.

But critics warn that the sites lead to increased numbers of rats and flies which help to spread disease. Compost also contains bacteria, spores and fungi that can become airborne in emissions known as bioaerosols, which are potentially harmful to humans. A Government-backed study by the Environment Agency and Cranfield University has already found that among 44 sites examined, only eight had produced adequate risk assessments on protecting the surrounding area from bioaerosols.

Studies on workers at composting sites have also shown that there is a risk of respiratory infections from organisms that thrive in decaying organic matter and diseases such as farmer's lung, a common cause of breathing difficulties among farm workers. Peter Sykes, head of the centre for public protection at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff, said: 'There is certainly an occupational risk to people working in compost sites, but the risk to residents living nearby is less well known. 'It depends on how the waste is being turned, the weather and the landscape itself.'

A survey of 132 residents living near a composting facility in Coven, Wolverhampton, carried out for Ken Purchase, MP for Wolverhampton North East, found that 66 felt the health of someone in their family had been harmed by the facility. Mr Purchase said: 'What is clear is that the nuisance is persistent and that the smell alone prevents residents enjoying the pleasure of their gardens and, in some cases, means doors and windows have to remain shut even on good summer days.'

It usually takes three months for organic waste to turn into usable compost, during which time temperatures inside the compost heaps can hit nearly 150F (65C).

In most sites waste is piled up in the open and regularly turned over by heavy machinery, which aids composition but spreads dust.

The Environment Agency is now producing new guidance for composting sites on how to reduce their emissions.

The UK produces more than 100million tons of food and other organic waste each year but currently just 2.8million tons are sent for composting.

Trelawney Dampney, managing director of Dorset-based Eco Sustainable Solutions and a director at the Association for Organics Recycling, said the industry was aware of the concerns and followed Environment Agency guidance to try to avoid any risk to the public. He said: 'The Environment Agency advises that all sites should be more than 250 yards from residential dwellings because within 250 yards the exposure to bioaerosols could be reasonably high, especially if they are down wind.'

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All I wanted was a parcel. I got an earful

By Giles Coren

One bright, dusty, midsummer-quiet afternoon last week the doorbell rang and I looked out of the window (to avoid making the long descent from study to street only to find a kid with a box of J Cloths for sale or some pair of credulous bozos with good news about the Lord) and saw that it was the postman.

Well, not exactly the postman. What I had seen was a Parcelforce van, which is better still. Now that Parcelforce is the large-object wing of the Post Office, the Parcelforce guy is more exciting than Postie himself, since Postie is now protected by safety-in-the-workplace guidelines from carrying anything that I might eat, drink, read or hang on the wall.

So I bustled to the door full of the joy of the day, ready to hail the fellow with my breeziest “good afternoon” and take delivery of whatever jolliness he had in his bag. But as I opened it, my hair and whiskers were fair blown back by loud music, a thumping beat and the shouted words: “I’m gonna **** you, bitch! Yeah, bitch! Yeah bitch! I’m gonna **** you, bitch! Yeah, bitch! Yeah, bitch!”

I was more than a little startled. The postman in question, however, a wiry, sullen-looking fellow, maybe 25 years old, with a Parcelforce beanie pulled low on his brow, seemed blissfully unbothered as he wordlessly handed me an electronic thing to sign. And indeed, when I looked out past him towards the noise, I saw that it emanated from his own vehicle, the aforementioned little red van, as little and red as Postman Pat’s, which was double-parked outside my house, in my quiet suburban street, with the windows open and this loud, aggressive rap booming from it: “I’m gonna **** you, bitch! Yeah, bitch! Yeah bitch!”

As he held the electronic thing in my face, the postman (and I insist on calling him a postman, despite his no doubt being officially known at Parcelforce as a “delivery solutions operative”, or some such, because he was delivering my post and was in the pay of Royal Mail Group Ltd) was actually nodding his head to this vile music.

When I was a kid, our postman, Derek, used to whistle as he came down the path with our letters. He may have been whistling a tune whose original words were, “I’m gonna **** you, bitch!” but I doubt it. It was usually Colonel Bogey.

I honestly didn’t know where to look. My house is 50 yards from a primary school. I might have been a little old lady (more than likely if you’re looking for a front door to be answered at three in the afternoon) or a mother with children. How can it possibly be acceptable for a man from the Royal Mail, the Royal bloody Mail, going about what is in theory Her Majesty’s business, to be declaring as he rings your mother’s doorbell, my mother’s doorbell, anybody’s mother’s doorbell, on a quiet June afternoon: “I’m gonna **** you, bitch! Yeah, bitch! Yeah bitch!”?

The man can listen to that kind of sick, sexist drivel in his own time, if he wants. And I dare say that the manager of whatever rap band it was he was listening to will have some excuse up his sleeve about how the song only reflects the sexist and aggressive mores of the street, without specifically endorsing them, but, I swear, if he showed up round my place with that kind of specious bilge I would specifically endorse his face for him.

I grasp that people under 25, people born into the iPod age, cannot conceive of music as anything but a constant backdrop. Music is no longer a thing to be enjoyed for its own sake, at gigs and festivals and in pubs and clubs and at home on a stereo, but is a vain and impotent declaration of self to be blared from cars and phones and laptops and headsets at all times — a constant somatic comfort to the dull, blunt, flabby modern brain. But to crawl the streets of the city playing offensive rap music on full volume with the windows wound down is the sort of carry-on you expect from teenage hoodlums, stabby little respec’-seekers and bug-eyed gang-rapists on crack. Not an employee of the Royal Mail. Not your bloody postman.

I didn’t know what to say to the man. So I didn’t say anything. Maybe if I had he would have shanked me for dissing his tunes. I don’t know, maybe that’s what they teach postmen to do these days.

Maybe, with all these threats to its business from e-mail and private sector courier companies, the Post Office is planning to go a different way to modernise. Maybe it is going to train postmen to carry blades, slouch down the street with their trousers round their knees, pouting and scowling and playing rape anthems on their phones, and asking people what they are staring at, so that they can stab them to death.

Or, I don’t know, maybe, “I’m gonna **** you, bitch! Yeah bitch! Yeah bitch!” is the message the Royal Mail is really trying to send us.

The tune, and its bone-headed, soul-sickening lyrics, stayed with me all day. Try how I might, I simply could not dislodge it from my brain, even with a constant, quiet, wistful repetition of “Postman Pat, Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white cat . . .”

SOURCE

2009-06-30T00:59:00.001+11:30

The Church of England and Die Judenfrage

I should have mentioned yesterday that the "learned" British judges who ruled that Jews are a race do have on their side one authority who is much respected to this day in academe: Karl Marx. Marx was of course the original self-hating Jew. He was furiously antisemitic. But Marx was a sponger. He rarely earned enough to keep himself and his family so was always "borrowing" money from someone. It was initially his father (Heinrich Marx was a real gentleman, a lovely man. How he ever had such a monster as Karl is hard to imagine) and he was in later years supported by Friedrich Engels out of the proceeds of the Engels family business. One therefore imagines that when he wrote a letter to his Jewish uncle in Holland he had in mind ingratiating himself for future borrowing. The letter was about Marx's excitement over the American civil war and his contempt for Benjamin Disraeli but in the course of his comments about Disraeli he does refer to "our race".

As I briefly touched on in the opening sentence to my post yesterday, I am not wholly unsympathetic to self-hating Jews. It must be appalling to realize that by the accident of your birth you are a member of a widely suspect and even hated group -- regardless of what your personal characteristics might be. Distancing oneself from that could even be a perfectly healthy reaction. But it is when such Jews extend the dislike of their origins to undermining Israel that they really get my goat. Why do they have to be so extreme? Why not simply become an Anglican, as Disraeli did? The Anglicans (Episcopalians in the USA) have lovely buildings, colourful services and the sermons demand nothing and in fact mean nothing at all. Why not just treat it as a pleasant Sunday morning time of relaxation and have a whole new identity to show for it? Many Anglican bishops are barely-disguised atheists so you certainly don't have to believe anything to be an Anglican. It is sometimes said that the only requirement for being an Anglican is good taste.

By the way, "Die Judenfrage" is German for "The Jewish Question" and is an expression used by both Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler so there is an allusion to history in the title I chose yesterday and today. It is actually a bit of a tease. Any stray Leftist coming by my writings would expect something antisemitic under that title -- but, as you can see, such an expectation would have been disappointed.

In my peculiar position as a atheist with an interest in religious matters, I take a continued interest not only in Jews but also in the Church of England. And I have recently put up on my Paralipomena blog an article by a Church of England bishop that makes doleful reading. He notes the steady decline in adherents to his church and suspects that his church will not exist at all in 30 years' time. But he has no real answer to that problem. So will the Church of England eventually disappear up its own backside? I think not. The problem, as I see it, is that they have somehow become dominated by dress-up queens. People go there for a show rather than for a boost to faith.

But amid such desecration of a great heritage, real faith does survive in patches. The Sydney diocese is the most vivid proof of that. Their churches are full and their seminary is overflowing with people with a religious vocation. So how do they do it? Simple. They have returned to their roots. The original faith of the New Testament is a mightily powerful one and the closer you get to that the more empowered you will be. And the 39 "Articles of Religion" that were the original definition of Anglicanism are a very powerful expression of early Protestant faith -- a faith that was very Bible-based. So my expectation is that the show-ponies of Anglicanism will wither away eventually and a core of real believers will remain.

They may even evangelize. Priests ordained in Sydney already do. They go into neighbouring dioceses and set up "Family Churches", much to the irritation of the local bishops. The Sydney priests end up having more people in their pews than the local Bishop does! So the vitality is there if you drink from the waters of the original New Testament faith. The knowalls may dismiss such faith as "old-fashioned" and "irrelevant to the modern world" but it still has a great power to bring blessings to its people.

2009-06-30T00:02:00.000+11:30

British doctors want right to pray for patients without fear of reprisal

Doctors are calling for the legal right to be allowed to pray alongside their patients. The British Medical Association is to debate whether the threat of disciplinary action should be lifted from NHS staff who try to meet patients' spiritual or religious needs. There has been concern among doctors and nurses that even offering to talk about such matters could be grounds for suspension.

Guidance issued by the Department of Health in a document called Religion Or Belief: A Practice Guide For The NHS has fuelled anxieties. It says such requests could be seen as harassment or intimidation and could lead to staff being disciplined.

Cancer specialist Dr Bernadette Birtwhistle, of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said the debate on Wednesday at the BMA's annual meeting in Liverpool would clarify how doctors and other staff could provide spiritual care for patients. She said: 'It's getting to where many of us feel we cannot talk to patients about their spiritual or religious needs or ask them about praying. 'Christianity is being seen as something that is unhelpful. 'Freedom of speech is being curtailed too much, and I don't think it is always in the benefit of patients.'

The move follows the case last year of nurse Caroline Petrie, from Westonsuper-Mare last year, who was suspended after a patient complained that she had offered to pray for her. North Somerset NHS Trust agreed she could return to work and pray for patients as long as she asked them first if they had any spiritual needs.

The Department of Health guidance states that members of some religions are expected to convert other people. It adds: 'To avoid misunderstandings and complaints, it should be made clear to everyone from the first day of training or employment that such behaviour could be construed as harassment under the disciplinary and grievance procedures.'

Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the BMA Council, said the importance of the issue for a minority of people 'could not be underestimated'. He said no healthcare professional should be able to impose their beliefs but it was 'perfectly acceptable' for patients with a terminal illness to be asked if they wanted to see a chaplain. Dr Vivienne Nathanson, director of professional activities at the BMA, said: 'It's hugely important that it's allowed, but it's not an opportunity to impose your views on patients.'

The BMA will debate the matter, making it clear that offering to pray for a patient should not be grounds for suspension. The Department of Health said the document was a guide to encourage awareness for staff and patients.

SOURCE

The "don't ask, don't tell" approach to immigration is what has given Britain's despised anti-immigration party an opportunity

By FRASER NELSON

Does it matter if immigrants have taken (or created) all the new jobs in the British private sector? I reveal this in my News of the World column today, as the key fact from a data request I made from the ONS. It’s a divisive topic, and even exploring it make ministers feel uncomfortable. But this ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach to immigration has not just given the BNP the political space needed for its electoral breakthrough three weeks ago, but left ministers ignorant about what’s going on in our labour market. Between Q1 of 1997 and Q1 of 2009, immigrants account for 106% of new jobs in the private sector – ie, there are more new workers (1.55m) than new jobs (1.47m).

I’ll update this post later with key graphs and put online the full response to my data request - this all deserves to be in the public domain. But it does strike me that the best way to fight the BNP is not to ban its MEPs from the House of Commons (as our MPs are now trying to do) but actually start learning about, and dealing with, the dynamics of migration. BNP support is the scream of the forgotten voter – and unless Westminster collectively starts to reach out to these people then the BNP’s success story may well have a good bit left to run.

SOURCE

Freaked by the BNP! British PM pledges to house local people first

But isn't that "racist", Gordo? It is when the BNP advocate it!

Gordon Brown is to try to win back Labour’s core supporters with a pledge to give priority on housing waiting-lists to local residents. A proposal to require councils to take account of applicants’ connections to the area when allocating homes is central to a policy blueprint. The populist measure risks reviving the controversy over Mr Brown’s call for “British jobs for British workers” .

A housebuilding programme is also to be announced today as Mr Brown seeks to regain the political initiative. Extra cash for social housing will come from a £500 million switch in spending, outlined in the new programme, Building Britain’s Future, The Times has learnt.

Resentment at needs-based rules under which newly arrived migrants are believed to be placed at the front of housing queues has long been cited by Labour MPs as eroding support among its core working-class voters. Housing is an important issue in the Labour heartlands, with 1.6 million households on council waiting lists — four million people in England and Wales. In some areas, a quarter of households are queueing for a home. Disaffection among traditional Labour supporters was plain at the recent council and European elections, at which British National Party MEPs were elected. Mr Brown’s decision to oblige councils to give priority to those with local connections who have been waiting a long time is being dubbed “British homes for British people”.

Senior government sources insist, however, that the policy is consistent with a new emphasis on entitlement to key public services. The measure will not require primary legislation, it is understood, but will be subject to consultation.

Other policies being announced today include guarantees of a maximum 18-week wait for a hospital appointment, limited to two weeks for cancer patients, and free health checks for the over-40s. The NHS will be placed under statutory obligations to meet what are currently only targets. [which will just lead to yet more fudging of the figures]

Mr Brown previewed the theme of the government paper in an interview with The Times last week, when he said that he would not flinch from taking on “any vested interest that stands in the way of better services”.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, is expected to take up the theme of entitlement tomorrow with the publication of a White Paper extending a guarantee of one-to-one tuition in maths and English for struggling pupils from primaries to the early years of secondary schools. It will also propose that league tables be replaced by a “report card” detailing schools’ performance on behaviour, truancy and parental satisfaction alongside exam results. Mr Balls is expected to duck the issue of whether schools should be ranked on a single grade. Critics claim such a move would diminish the emphasis schools place on academic performance.

Today’s policy blueprint, which will also include economic measures as well as the draft legislative programme for the last session before the general election, comes in the midst of a fierce row over public spending.

Yesterday Yvette Cooper, the Work and Pensions Secretary, told the BBC that ministers wanted to improve accountability in the public services. Challenged in a Politics Show interview on what would happen if entitlements were not met, she said the punishments would depend on the service concerned. Refusing to comment on whether hospitals would have money taken away if they failed, Ms Cooper said: “There are . . . areas, in which you do have penalties, where actually you don’t get the services improved, but this will depend on particular areas.”

SOURCE

The Gauleiter complex in Britain

(Gauleiters were local Nazi officials. Post from Prof. Brignell)

In these pages we have frequently remarked that the British experience should be taken as a warning of what could happen in the USA . Nevertheless, Americans have gone ahead with their own experiment in authoritarian socialism. Typical of the phenomenon is hurriedly and ill drafted legislation that puts power into the hands of minor and unelected officials. It is an unfortunate characteristic of some people that such power goes to their heads, and many of those in positions that once were intended to represent servants of the people now come to regard themselves as the masters. In Britain much of the primary legislation comes directly from Brussels in the form of “Directives”, which are diktats, emerging from a secretive bureaucracy, that have never been properly debated or received the benefit of expert advice.

American politicians now have their own version of this process, as exemplified by the bizarre goings-on that led to the House of Representatives passing a weirdly inapposite Climate Change Bill. The cost of the Global Warming Myth, already staggering, is about to increase by orders of magnitude, tantamount to economic suicide.

One of the many dubious claims of the proponents is that it will create Green Jobs. This is a dysphemism for a new class of people living off the taxpayer. A major sub-class is The Snoopers. We had them in the UK during the post-war Labour Government. They were tasked with such duties as preventing private enterprise. It was largely Winston Churchill’s successful campaign against The Snoopers that brought that spendthrift Government to an end. Nowadays opposition leaders are considerably less effective.

Now The Snoopers are back. They pry into our garbage bins, secretly film us and employ covert agents to follow us (justified by legislation originally promoted as being anti-terrorist). One couple were subjected to a prolonged stake-out to check that they were living where they claimed to be and not evading the equality rules in the educational lottery. A teenager was prosecuted for allowing a toddler to discard a sweet wrapper. Fortunately, our judges still have enough power to treat such cases with the derision they deserve. What is not disclosed is how much this snooping impoverishes the taxpayer, but it is not difficult to imagine the cost of several weeks of secret surveillance. Also typical is the fact that the actions in question were not even offences until the advent of New Labour Government. It is not only a crime to want to select a school for your child (unless you are rich), there are now so many new offences that no one, even the lawyers, knows what is legal or illegal. There are literally thousands of new crimes (including the Orwellian sounding enviro-crimes). When the Government is enacting seven new laws every day, without a semblance of proper debate, ordinary people are exposed to legal hazards of which they are completely unaware.

These are the conditions under which the Gauleiters thrive. Every citizen is threatened with the circumstances of Kafka’s Joseph K, arraigned for crimes and misdemeanours unknown, and helpless in the face of an all powerful officialdom. Furthermore, ordinary people are now encouraged to become informers. Records show that 28 Gestapo were able to rule a million people by the use of informers. Many people were wrongly arrested owing to accusations motivated by malice or revenge. When journalists enquire about cases like those mentioned above, the response always comes from someone called “A Spokesman”, anonymous and unelected. There is no comeback if they get it wrong. The ultimate insult is that the poor chumps they pick on have been forced to contribute to the inflated salaries these officials command. One of the greatest financial burdens carried by the poorer elements of society, such as pensioners, is the dramatic inflation of local taxes.

Look on this America. It is your future.

SOURCE

Wimbledon admits good-looking female tennis players get centre court

This was being furiously denied just days ago. I mentioned it on 22nd.

"Good looks count for more than tennis ability when it comes to choosing which women play on Wimbledon's centre court. A succession of easy-on-the-eye unknowns have appeared in Wimbledon's prime arena this year while some of the top women's seeds have been relegated to lesser courts.

The All England Club admitted that physical attractiveness is taken into consideration. Spokesman Johnny Perkins said: "Good looks are a factor."

A BBC source said: "It's the Wimbledon play committee, not us who decides on the order of play. "But obviously it's advantageous to us if there are good-looking women players on Centre Court. "Our preference would always be a Brit or a babe as this always delivers high viewing figures."

Source

Britain: PC repair techs serve as police spies: "A visit to your PC repair shop could be swiftly followed by a trip to court and a short stay in your local jail if it harbours any remotely questionable material — whether you knew about it or not. That, at least, is the fear as the latest confirmed outing for the Dangerous Pictures Act sees one individual prosecuted after a PC engineer spotted potentially unlawful pictures on their PC — and his line manager passed on details to the police.”

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

2009-06-29T00:53:00.000+11:30

Amazing: Government of Victoria imports the trash of the world's social workers

There is a unending stream of stories coming out of Britain detailing the sheer evil of British social workers -- and Australians need that garbage? Their attitudes stem from the Marxist hate they learn in their social work schools: The middle classes are the enemy and the "worker" can do no wrong. Too bad if the occasional child get brutalized and killed. Victoria shouldn't be touching such animals with a bargepole. I regularly post horror stories about British social workers here and on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Thank goodness the recruitment drive was largely unsuccessful

THE Brumby Government has spent more than $500,000 of taxpayer money in five months to recruit health workers from the United Kingdom and Ireland and fly them to Victoria. The Department of Human Services alone spent $457,051 to lure 50 child protection workers from England, Ireland and Scotland in a recruitment campaign launched last October. But by last March only 19 European child protection staff had started work in Victoria, with a recruitment cost of more than $24,000 per person on top of an average annual salary of $49,800. And at least three have since returned home, citing "personal" or "medical" reasons.

The DHS spent $224,000 on advertising, $134,000 to relocate workers to Australia and more than $1300 on a welcome party, documents obtained by the Sunday Herald Sun through Freedom of Information reveal. Community Services Minister Lisa Neville flew business class to the UK for a "welcome event" celebrating the success of the scheme - racking up a $52,000 bill in the process. Ms Neville defended the spending, saying the Government had taken action to recruit desperately needed staff and expand services. "We make no excuses for trying to find the best people to help stand up for vulnerable Victorians," she said.

Opposition community services spokeswoman Mary Wooldridge said the move was a "stop-gap solution" to a major problem. "Here we are at a time when the Government is trying to promote our workforce and they're bringing in these workers from overseas," she said. "They're spending all this money to bring in offshore workers when they have known about the problems for years and failed to act."

A Government spokeswoman, Peta James, said that as of last week there were 31 child protection workers recruited from overseas in Victoria - seven in regional areas and 24 in Melbourne. She said four more were likely to arrive by the end of July. The workers, recruited from London, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and Belfast, have been offered two-year contracts in the hope they will stay in Victoria and then train Australian graduates.

The Government paid their immigration and citizenship fees, airfares and short-term accommodation costs to convince them to move to Victoria. Information and interview sessions held in the UK to recruit them cost $91,189. Two DHS staff sent to oversee the process lodged expense claims for almost $15,000.

SOURCE

Scandal of the migrant criminals in Britain: How legal lunancy left serial sex offender free to kill girl, 12

In the year to April, Britain received more than 3,500 requests from foreign countries for the return of their criminals. More than 150 were suspected or convicted murderers. The astonishing total was up by a quarter on the previous 12 months.

The vast majority of the 'wanted' suspects hailed from European Union countries. As Detective Chief Inspector Murray Duffin, of the Scotland Yard Extradition and Intelligence Unit, has warned: 'Britain is becoming a magnet for increasing numbers of criminals from the former Eastern bloc countries which are now members of the EU.'

Notably, the number of fugitives being sought by Poland has soared 14-fold since 2004, when the country joined the EU and its citizens were allowed to live in Britain. The Warsaw police now send a charter plane to Britain every month to pick up their countrymen wanted for killings, rape, robbery, burglary, drugs and theft. Last year, officers from the extradition unit returned 275 Poles accused of crimes back home.

Even the police chief of Albania - which is not an EU member - has warned that Britain has become the favourite sanctuary for fugitives. He recently claimed that the UK is harbouring 80 Albanian killers and 20 other serious offenders. Many have got British citizenship after deceiving our authorities and claiming asylum by pretending to be from war-torn Kosovo.

So why does our extradition system take so long to send back the suspected foreign criminals found here? And what are the implications for our own safety as rapists and murderers freely walk our streets?

In London, a fifth of all offences, a third of all sex attacks and half of all frauds are committed by those born overseas. In the West Midlands, the number of foreigners accused of crimes doubled to 3,700 in the five years up to 2008. In the country as a whole, drink-driving convictions of foreigners have shot up 17 times. And it is hard not to suspect that many of them will have had criminal records before they came to Britain. For as one London senior police officer told me: 'A criminal doesn't stop being a criminal just because he moves country - and that is the real problem. Our first call when we get an extradition request from a foreign country is to the British prison authorities, because that is where they are often to be found.' Indeed, about 5 per cent of all extradition requests concern suspects who have already been jailed for offences committed in the UK.

Many have arrived here illicitly, smuggling themselves into Britain hidden in lorries [trucks] arriving from Calais, Dunkirk and Boulogne, or on trains through the Channel tunnel. This week the Home Office said that last year 28,000 foreigners clandestinely tried to enter the country by these routes. 'Inevitably, some are running away from their own justice system,' explained the police officer.

The trouble is, by the time foreign criminals are successfully tracked down it's often too late. In one horrific case, schoolgirl Katerina Koneva, 12, was strangled at her home in Hammersmith, West London, by Andrezej Kunowski, who had spent 15 years in jail in his native Poland for serial sex offences. The 51-year-old was awaiting trial in his home country for further sex attacks when, in June 1996, he was freed on bail for urgent medical treatment and absconded, travelling to Britain under a tourist visa. (Poland was not yet a member of the EU.)

He murdered Katerina a year later, and although the Polish authorities continued to seek his extradition, Kunowski remained at large in the UK for six years after her death. It was only when he was arrested for the rape of a 22-year-old student from London that police were able to use the DNA samples they had taken to link him to Katerina's killing. He is serving life in prison in Britain and is unlikely ever to be released - which means that he will never face justice in his own country.

Yet shocking though his case is, there are many more like him still at large in Britain. In fact, only a fraction of those suspected of crimes in their home country and traced to Britain are ever successfully extradited. Of the 3,526 foreigners for whom extradition requests were made by European Union countries in the past year, 683 were arrested and only one in seven - 516 - returned, according to the latest figures released to the Mail by the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

As for those from outside the EU, the Home Office says that of the 300 'wanted' by the rest of the world since 2003, a third escaped extradition and remain here. There are a myriad legal loopholes to sidestep removal. The suspects' lawyers often claim - successfully - that their clients will suffer human rights abuse or will not face a fair trial back home. The extradition process can be dragged out for years if suspects appeal to the High Court and then up again to the Home Secretary. If they come from outside the EU, many instantly claim asylum. This request has then to be considered by the courts before the extradition process can even begin. In a further twist, those accused of offences carrying the death penalty in their home country cannot - by our law - be returned because Britain has abolished capital punishment.

This begs the question of whether the most dangerous foreign criminals are deliberately settling here because they are safe from extradition. The situation is even more complicated if the suspected foreign criminal has a wife and children in this country. Under the Human Rights Act 1998, they can fight removal, claiming their family life would be disrupted.

The crisis was highlighted earlier this month with the Crimestoppers' campaign to track down foreign criminals here. The 16 named suspects were mainly from Eastern Europe (eight from Albania alone) and included six rapists and six murderers. Lord Ashcroft, who founded Crimestoppers, said: 'Fugitives hide across the globe in all communities. When you look at the criminals that are on the most wanted list, they can be truly horrible people and need to be caught.'

To speed the extradition process, new laws on sending criminals back to Europe were passed in 2003. However, over four days in court, I saw a score of foreigners using every twist and turn in the law to fight removal. Take Fred Undrits, who is wanted in Estonia for burning down a house. The 23-year-old was brought to the extradition hearing from prison, where he is serving a 56-day sentence for shoplifting. He has been in Britain since 2006 and his case might take years to decide.

And what of Albanian Shkelzen Gradica? The 33-year-old has changed his name to Robert and was convicted in his absence in Italy of attempted murder. His defence team argue it could breach his human rights to be sent to Rome because he would not get a fair trial. The reason? Gradica was convicted on the basis of an unreliable witness statement and has never had the chance to answer the allegations against him in an Italian courtroom.

From Poland, Maciej Blaszko, 30, has been accused in Warsaw of attempted robbery and driving while disqualified. Here he has been fighting extradition with a team of lawyers paid for with legal aid funded by the British taxpayer. Blaszko says he won't get a fair trial back home because the police case against him was prepared when he had fled the country for the UK.

And then there was paedophile Julius Horvath, convicted in 1996 of the sexual assault and rape of a child in the Czech Republic. Horvath slipped through our borders and came to Britain in 2000. Despite his dubious past, he successfully claimed asylum. Living in a one-bed council flat in Leeds, he even received job seekers' allowance. The 54-year old has also had numerous run-ins with police here, according to evidence given at the extradition hearing. In the past four years, the Czech has been cautioned for affray, being drunk and disorderly, serious assault and shoplifting. Luckily for him, he has one son living here, and four grandchildren who were born here, which means the chances of him ever going home are slim indeed. Why? His lawyers say that a return would infringe his 'family life' under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act.

And then there was the suspected Hungarian paedophile Balazs Asztalos. He made a second appearance at the extradition court ten days after he was found by police in Milton Keynes. His employers, S and D Leisure, admitted they did not have a clue their polite young employee was a suspected child molester. 'We were really amazed when he was arrested,' said company owner Stanley Reeves. 'If we'd had the slightest inkling he was on the run from police we never would have given him a job.' The family-run company, which operates bungee rides all over the country, had taken down Asztalos' details from his passport and started to run a police criminal record check on him.

Now Mr Reeves is questioning how Asztalos had not been tracked down to Britain before. He arrived in Britain in 2006. In the extradition court, Asztalos' shoulder-length hair was swept back from his face with gel, and he looked completely different to the shavenheaded figure who had appeared in the Crimestoppers photograph. But already there are nagging doubts about whether he can ever be returned. The court heard that the Hungarian police have questioned three other people - including Asztalos' own mother - in connection with child sex abuse in his home town. Defence barrister Martin Henley told the extradition court the trio had all been released without charge.

And then Mr Henley announced his bombshell. He said that under British laws the extradition request was useless if Asztalos was wanted only for interviews by Hungarian police and was not, thus far, subject to a fullblown arrest warrant. While inquiries are made about exactly what the situation is, the young Hungarian will remain in prison.

Asztalos is innocent until proven guilty, but there are countless other foreign crooks and deviants with dubious pasts who are making Britain an infinitely more unsafe place for decent people to live in. It is a scandal of terrifying proportions.

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Some socialist policing to inspire you

After 12 years of Leftist government, Britain's police no longer care about ordinary crime but if you call a homosexual something derogatory, you are sure to get a visit. The Australian State where I live has also been Left-run for a long time (since 1989 with one brief interruption) and they are even worse than the police in the story below. The Queensland police refused to take any interest when I handed them an ID card dropped by a person who had stolen my car. No "lack of evidence" excuse there. Their excuse was that the thief had "No form" (no criminal record). One wonders how anybody ever gets any "form" in that case. I am very familiar with the complete lack of police interest in crime reported by the woman below

A family have criticised a police force which claimed it could not investigate a theft at their home - even though they live just 70 yards from the local police station. Paula and David Whitfield, who works as a carer, were confident local officers would investigate after a pony cart, worth £500, was stolen from outside their house. But after reporting the theft and told not to disturb any potential evidence the couple waited in vain for officers to come round, take a statement and check for fingerprints.

Four days after the Whitfields' reported the crime they were stunned to get a letter from police saying they had closed the case. Exasperated Mrs Whitfield, 38, said: 'I couldn't believe they were disregarding a crime which happened on their own doorstep. 'We live so close to the police station that we can even hear the cell doors. Officers going to and from the station actually walk past our house. 'What's the point of them being there if they don't do their jobs?'

The letter from Hampshire Police said they had 'recorded' the theft at the Whitfields' home in the heart of New Forest. It added: 'Unfortunately we are unable to take any action. 'This is because there is not enough evidence available at this stage to make a case for prosecution and so your case has been closed.'

Mrs Whitfield rang police to complain when she received the letter on Saturday and was told an officer would visit. But when she had still not heard anything by Tuesday evening she walked around the corner to the police station but was told the relevant officer was in a meeting. Eventually Mrs Whitfield received a call from the officer but said she was still given no assurance that the theft of the cart would be properly investigated. She said: 'I got the impression from her attitude that she did not think it was important, that they would not trace the cart and that it would just be a waste of police time. 'A crime has happened in their own back yard and their attitude has been an absolute joke.'

Hampshire police have now said the letter was sent 'in error' and promised the crime would be investigated. However, their belated response has failed to impress the mother of four who plans to make a formal complaint to Hampshire police. She said: ''Some scenes of crime officers have been round but they say they only managed to get a partial fingerprint. 'That's hardly surprising because they finally came more than a week after the theft and it's rained a couple of times since then. 'They know they've mucked up and are attempting to cover their tracks. 'I'm 100 per cent convinced they've only decided to investigate the theft because the media have got involved. 'It makes me think I should try to investigate matters myself in future.'

Mrs Whitfield and her husband have abandoned any hope of being reunited with the cart, which they used to break in New Forest ponies. Despite being chained up it was stolen from a small garden beside their semi-detached house where their son Mitchell, 15, had spent several months rebuilding it. A police spokesman has since admitted the letter had been generated too early and sent in error. He said: 'When the crime was reported there weren't many lines of inquiry because the victims didn't see or hear anything. The theft will be investigated.'

Asked why police did not visit the couple the spokesman said the personnel involved did not work at that particular police station and had no way of knowing the Whitfields lived so close to the building. Chief Inspector Gary Cooper said: 'It is important to note that all incidents reported to police are dealt with in accordance with a grading system. 'Proximity to a police station does not qualify anyone for a preferential service. 'Upon receiving reports of the theft of a pony cart from an address in Lyndhurst, several unsuccessful attempts were made to re-contact the owners by telephone.'

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A new naughty word: "scuffer"

Whining Scottish cop complains about a word of dubious meaning

"David Cameron has ordered an investigation into a claim that a Tory MP manhandled and racially abused a Scottish policeman during a demonstration in Parliament Square. Mark Pritchard is accused of calling PC Ray McQuarrie a ‘scuffer’ – said to be slang for peasant – and of trying to push him out of the way when his route to the Commons was blocked.

PC McQuarrie complained to his superiors and wrote to Mr Cameron asking for an apology, claiming Mr Pritchard, 42, had been drinking when the alleged incident occurred before midnight. Mr Cameron asked Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin to investigate....

PC McQuarrie obtained his definition of scuffer from the online Urban Dictionary. It calls them a ‘peasant underclass, known for wearing “prison white” training shoes and Burbery check,’ it adds they like ‘drinking cheap spirits/wines on the street and from a bottle, drink pints of lager until they cannot stand at which point they attempt to fight anybody within arms length’. They are also said to ‘chain smoke, write in pigeon English, constantly swear and spit and regard petty theft and violent crime as a game’.

However, Urban Dictionary also gives another definition as a ‘hegemonic power tool of the state, law enforcer’. Other dictionaries say ‘scuffer’ is merely Northern slang for a policeman.

Mr Pritchard last night said: ‘It is the case that when my route was blocked by police officers I objected. ‘I was, however, neither abusive towards them, nor did I push anyone. I did not use the words ‘Scottish scuffer’. ‘Until the complaint was drawn to my attention I had never heard of, let alone myself used, this expression

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It sounds like rather a good word. I will try to remember it. It might come in handy.

2009-06-28T00:44:00.000+11:30

Could this happen in Britain?

I doubt that many modern day Brits would have the ticker for it anyway but if they did the guy concerned would not be praised by the authorities. He would be bawled out and punished in some way for breaching "Elf 'n Safety" rules. You must go through the "proper channels" before doing anything. Story below from Australia

Firefighters have praised a Williamstown diner for single handedly extinguishing a potentially fatal warehouse blaze.

Joe Vetesi was dining with three friends at Williamstowns Satorini restaurant when he heard a call for help about 10pm. Noticing a fire in a Parker St warehouse he ran to help. "I have 29 years CFA experience so I'd like to think I know what I'm doing," Mr Vetesi said.

Mr Vetesi scaled a three metre high fence to gain entry to the warehouse and sourced water to extinguish the blaze. "My first concern was that people were inside but once I realised the warehouse was unoccupied I went about putting the fire out," he said.

Two fire crews attended the scene. Newport senior station officer Shane Rhodes praised Mr Vetesis actions. "When we arrived the fire was basically extinguished - he did a good job," he said.

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Yet again British social workers were too busy harassing middle-class parents to deal with dangerous feral families (1)

It's part of the Marxist hate they learn in social work schools: The middle classes are the enemy and the "worker" can do no wrong. Too bad if the occasional child get brutalized and killed

Social workers in Doncaster failed to intervene before a father snapped the spine of his 16-month-old daughter despite being aware she was at significant risk, an inquiry has found. Amy Howson was punched on numerous occasions by her father, James, leaving her with fractures to her arms, legs and ribs. Basic procedures that might have prevented her death were not followed. The 25-year-old was later sentenced to a minimum of 22 years in prison.

A serious case review into the way social services dealt with the family revealed that there had been sufficient information about the father’s violence for action to have been taken. It was one of two serious case reviews published today into the deaths of youngsters murdered in the borough of Doncaster, South Yorkshire. There was such concern at the inadequacy of the children’s services that, earlier this year, the Government sent in a leadership team to manage the council’s social services department and the then mayor, Martin Winter, made it clear he would not be seeking re-election. In total the deaths of eight children known to the town’s social services since 2004 are being investigated.

In a separate serious case review into the death of Alfie Goddard, who died from head injuries in May last year at 11 weeks old, agencies were criticised for failing to heed warning signs. The child’s father, Craig Goddard, 24, a man who struggled with alcohol and drugs, threw the child to the floor because he was crying. He was known to have had issues over controlling his temper.

The report’s authors concluded that agencies failed to recognise that anger, mental health problems, substance use and domestic violence could be risk factors for children. Individual bodies, including social services and health workers, generally acted in isolation. “There was very little communication between agencies and no co-ordinated involvement with the family,” said the report. "There was also a tendency for agencies to concentrate on the needs of the parents without considering the impact on the children.”

It was the shockingly violent death of Amy Howson in December 2007 that pushed Doncaster’s social service provision onto the national stage. In the report’s conclusion, the authors suggest: “The murder of Child B (Amy Howson) by her father was not predictable given the information and knowledge held on him and other family members by agencies. “However, there was sufficient information and knowledge on family members, including (the father), held by individual agencies to conclude that, on balance, both Child B and (and another child) were at risk of significant harm from him. “Some agencies within the Doncaster multi-agency child protection system failed to follow basic safeguarding procedures and did not take proper and effective action to safeguard and promote the welfare of Child B and (another child).”

The report also suggested that the Doncaster Community and Schools Social Worker Service, the Youth Inclusion Support Service and the Doncaster PCT Health Visiting Service missed key opportunities to intervene to help the child. The borough’s children’s services, which received only one star in the Audit Commission’s assessment last year, remain under the control of the Government’s intervention team.

Gareth Williams, the director of children’s services, insisted that plans are now in place to offer an effective service run by experienced staff. However, he admitted that there were still problems with recruitment. Julie Bolus, director of quality and clinical assurance for NHS Doncaster, said that changes to working procedures have been made, including how information is shared with other agencies.

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Yet again British social workers were too busy harassing middle-class parents to deal with dangerous feral families (2)

Social services are in the dock again after a toddler was left to die at the hands of a schoolboy babysitter despite repeated warnings that she was in grave danger. Demi-Leigh Mahon, two, was punched, kicked and bitten by 15-year-old Karl McCluney, while her drug-addict mother was out collecting child benefit. The little girl suffered at least 68 separate injuries.

As McCluney was convicted of murder the catalogue of failings by social services was finally revealed. An independent report found that social workers should have taken action. They knew that Demi-Leigh was being raised in a drugs den. Members of the public and neighbours had told children's services that the child was left crying a lot and that her mother, Ann-Marie McDonald, was injecting heroin and was unable to care for her. Police had reports of domestic abuse.

Yet at no point did social services intervene, and Demi-Leigh was never placed on the 'at risk' register. The case is the second in two years in which Salford social services - branded inadequate by Ofsted in 2007 - have been found to be at fault. However, no one has been disciplined over the errors which enabled Demi-Leigh's mother to leave her daughter with McCluney, who had previously threatened to beat up a teacher and stab another man.

In March last year 31-year-old Miss McDonald - known as Sindy - was given a rehabilitation order after being convicted of supplying heroin and cocaine from her flat in Eccles, near Manchester. But she failed to comply and took Demi-Leigh to a friend's flat, resulting in a warrant for her arrest.

On July 15, she left her daughter with McCluney at his father's flat. It was his 15th birthday. When Demi-Leigh began crying he flew into a rage. He subjected the defenceless toddler to an appalling assault, punching her in the face, biting her and kicking her. When Miss McDonald returned after an hour and a half, Demi-Leigh was barely breathing. She died in hospital two days later.

McCluney admitted manslaughter but a jury at Manchester Crown Court found him guilty of murder. He was remanded in custody and will be sentenced next month.

Last night Demi-Leigh's father, Gary Mahon, and grandmother, Frances Gillon, said they twice contacted the council up to six months before the toddler's death. Mrs Gillon, 68, said: 'It is a disgusting failure by social services. 'They should have done something. There was no communication and they need their back sides kicking.'

Demi-Leigh's father, Gary Mahon, who left the family home when she was just three months old and now lives in Morecambe, Lancashire, said: 'Demi was a much-loved and wanted child. She smiled so much she looked like a Cheshire Cat.'

In a statement Miss McDonald said: 'I always tried to do my best and I'd do anything I could for Demi but sometimes I feel I didn't get the help and support I needed.

Ministers told Salford social services bosses last year to make improvements or be removed following Demi-Leigh's death and a report on failings which led to the death of a twoyearold boy in a blaze at his home. Additional social workers have now been recruited and the improvement notice has been lifted.

John Merry, the leader of Salford council, said: 'I do not want to make excuses, but the report's sad conclusion is that this tragedy could not have been foreseen and it could not have been prevented.'

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Whistleblower helpline for NHS doctors as concerns for patient safety grow

Hospital doctors wanting to raise fears about patient safety are to be given an anonymous “whistleblower” helpline because of growing evidence of staff reluctance to speak out for fear of recriminations. The dedicated phoneline has been set up as part of new guidelines issued by the British Medical Association, and seen by The Times, designed to help to formalise the process of “whistleblowing” in the NHS.

Doctors will be presented with two motions at the BMA annual conference next week calling for action to address staff concerns about reporting malpractice. One motion, proposed by the BMA’s agenda committee, warns that the NHS risks another patient safety scandal like that of Mid-Staffordshire where 400 deaths were linked to poor care, such is the scale of the problem. It calls for trusts and regulators to pool all complaints from clinicians to identify worrying trends. A second motion, proposed by junior doctors, calls on the General Medical Council to recognise formally that the harassment of whistleblowers is a serious breach of medical regulations. It also requests guidance on whistle-blowing.

Tom Dolphin, a junior doctor specialising in anaesthesia based in East London, said he had felt compelled to act after hearing of the experiences of colleagues who had to work without some patient-monitoring equipment. “One colleague needed equipment that wasn’t there, and was told there wasn’t any. There can be a culture of ‘that’s the way it's always been and no one’s come to harm yet anyway’. Others tried to raise concerns, got nowhere and had pretty much given up.”

The BMA guidelines, released today, follow research suggesting hospital doctors are frequently frustrated in their attempts to raise concerns about standards of care, despite recommendations by the Department of Health for the development of whistleblowing policies six years ago. A survey of 565 doctors working in hospitals in England and Wales found that three quarters had had concerns about issues relating to patient safety, malpractice or bullying in the NHS, the majority linked to standards of patient care.

Many said that their experiences of reporting issues had been negative — either because they were ignored or because their complaint was shared more widely than they were comfortable with. One in six doctors who reported concerns said that their trusts had indicated that their employment could be negatively affected.

The BMA advises hospital doctors to err on the side of raising any concerns about malpractice or systemic failures, and to do it as soon as they can, rather than allowing the situation to reach a point where patient safety is threatened. It points out that employees who are victimised after raising their concerns can go to an employment tribunal, and that employers can be heavily fined. “If told not to raise or pursue any concern, even by a person in authority such as a manager, you should not agree to remain silent,” it states, adding that “raising concerns is not just a matter of personal conscience — in some circumstances it is a professional obligation”.

Last month Jonathan Fielden, the chairman of the BMA consultants committee, called for sweeping changes to reporting problems in the NHS. He said that “a culture of inactivity and despair is preventing issues from coming to light, and putting patient care at risk”.

Margaret Haywood, a nurse, is appealing to the High Court against a decision by the Nursing and Midwifery Council to strike her off the register for secretly filming at a Brighton hospital. Footage showed examples of neglect, including an elderly patient sitting in clothes he had soiled the night before.

Earlier this month the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) called for greater reporting of safety issues in hospitals in a report on paediatric healthcare. It said that 10,000 alerts over medication given to children were being issued annually in the NHS, including errors in the calculation of drug doses and health workers forgetting to give patients their medicine. The NPSA report concludes that over the period of a year 33 children and 39 newborn babies died with “indicators of avoidable factors”.

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Britain: The bankrupt welfare State: "The stark evidence of the growing imbalance between what the Government raises and what it spends is likely to intensify the political row over the public finances and may strengthen calls for cuts in spending. Treasury figures show that welfare payments will exceed income tax receipts by almost £25 billion. Normally, income tax receipts comfortably cover the benefits bill. The disparity between tax revenue and welfare costs was identified by Andrew Brough, a fund manager at Schroder Investment Management, who suggested that the amount of money spent on social protection could soon exceed that raised from both income tax and national insurance. According to an official Treasury forecast, benefits will cost £170.9 billion in 2010/11. That is equal to what the Government will spend on the NHS, schools and universities combined. This year will be the first in a decade that benefits cost more than workers pay in income tax."