CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT ALL MAN'S FAULT
Comment from Britain
I would be much more susceptible to the screams of the by now rather hysterical "climate change" maniacs if they would only make their minds up. Thirty years ago we were all being told to rush out and buy -thermal underwear for the coming New Ice Age. What happened to it? Two years ago we were assured that "global warming" would give us warmer, wetter winters but long, hot, dry summers. Is that what has been happening in Tewkesbury? Now we are told global warming has given us the wettest summer since records began. Maybe. But this year's downpour is just one inch more than nine other years and eight of them took place when there wasn't a car or jet engine on the planet. So what caused the broken records?
It is clear the climate is changing and man is a contributory factor. But as to man's exact percentage contribution, we simply do not know. Climate has simply billions of variables which even huge computers cannot solve. What?effect?on?-climate?does violent solar activity (in this area the sun has been going crazy for several years) have? And why do Pacific currents such as El Nino and La Nina have such a staggering effect on the entire global climate when they mal-function (as they both just have)? And why do they do it? We just do not know.
But we do know some things. We know that there have been rhythmic warmings?and?coolings?of?the climate. And we know they occurred when mankind had nothing to burn more than a few logs from the forest. We know that trees create moisture?which?becomes?rain?and changes the local climate for the better. In 1948, Palestine (contrary to fashionable propaganda) was nearly barren. I do not know how many millions of trees the Israelis have planted since then but today it is green and lush and the forests lure in the rain clouds.
We know that the Horn of Africa is a hell of dust and desert sand but once it was clothed in vast oak forests. The natives cut them down, burned them, never replanted and moved on. The wind blew away the soil that the tree roots had once held firm and turned forest into desert.
We know that scientists will soon produce the hydrogen-based fuel cell to power cars and houses. Until then we can generate electricity with nuclear fission and later fusion. Even later we will derive geothermal energy from the blazing core of the Earth to create steam to drive -turbines?and?make?electricity -without smoke or pollution.
No, I do not believe man is doomed. Nor do I believe he should behave as if he is insane. But I do believe our Big Brothers will use the headless chicken hysteria to rip vast quantities of money from our -pockets, shouting "save the planet, save the planet" while they gorge themselves on our sweat and labour.
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Britain must face up to the truth on immigration
It is the perfect Gordon Brown summer holiday. Lasting less than 24 hours, his break on the South Coast was temporarily abandoned as he rushed back to London to continue his prime ministerial baptism by fire, flood and foot and mouth. Before he had time to remove his linen jacket (look, no tie) and unpack his bucket and spade, he was back chairing Cobra, directing the handling of his latest emergency....
One issue on the horizon encapsulates the scale of the opportunities and obstacles facing Brown. Immigration has gone "out of fashion" (the type of phrase our political class uses when it would rather not discuss an embarrassing issue of significant concern to voters). Outside the Westminster village it is number one, according to recent polling. Insecurity, uncertainty and confusion, those stalwarts of the human condition, are driving the opinions of a public in search of reassurance.
Last week's leaked memo to Brown was drawn up by Blair's favourite pollster Philip Gould. It was two years old, so even more prescient. He wrote: "There is no doubt the political landscape is changing: crime, terror, immigration and so on are now the dominant issues. Underpinning these concerns is a growing sense of the power of events beyond our control - globalised economies, international terror, community disintegration and so on. The public are increasingly aware of the forces of change that politicians find hard to affect."
The Government is well aware it is confronted by forces that voters fear, which is why it tries to deal with the issue on the quiet. The Sunday Telegraph reveals today that the Government is working on a back-door amnesty for 450,000 asylum seekers. No matter how it is spun, this is an acceptance by ministers that they are powerless to remove those among that number who have come to Britain for work and not, as they claim, for asylum.
The numbers related to immigration are astonishing. In excess of 600,000 eastern Europeans have arrived since their countries acceded to the European Union. In London last year, 53 per cent of births were to mothers who were not born in Britain; across England and Wales it was 22 per cent. It does not take a genius to work out that in 18 years, the capital's adult population will be even more diverse than now. Even modest population projections, from the Government's own actuary, put the UK population up seven million at 67 million by 2031. Others say it is an underestimate.
Try imagining six Birminghams, or the combined population of Wales and Scotland, landing on us in the decades ahead, and ask yourself if Britain's housing market, transport network, education system and NHS are built to cope. It is at this point that some idiots of the liberal-Left start using the "R" word to shut down rational discussion. Race has nothing to do with it: this is about the impracticality of what the Government proposes to let happen because it has lost any sense of how to stop, slow or manage it.
It might be just about possible to conclude that this boom is all to the good: dynamic countries attract migrants and dying societies do not. Those who come here are often the most ambitious and hard-working of their country's men and women. And it is also true that our record on immigration down the centuries is good. How arid British cultural life, in the arts, law and politics, would be without it.
But only a fool would say that the largest wave of immigration in these islands' history does not require calm, urgent examination. Do we think it wise when 5.1 million Britons sit on the economically inactive scrap-heap? And can we drop the suicidal fixation on multiculturalism and replace it with a multi-racial idea of a Britain not embarrassed to invoke the country's virtues in the name of unity?
Mr Brown senses an opportunity ahead and plans to be tougher in ways he has yet to work out in full. He know this is territory which David Cameron wants to avoid. All the evidence is that while voters agreed with Michael Howard's message at the last election, on managed migration and stricter border controls, they disliked the messenger. Now the feedback from Labour MPs to the Prime Minister emphasises just how worried voters have become since then in seats it would not take much for Labour to lose. Mr Brown's "Britishness" speeches were driven as much by these concerns as they were by his futile and, so far, unnecessary attempt to prevent the English remembering that he is Scottish.
But there is one rather large problem. There is, under our current arrangements with our EU partners and lack of border controls, very little the Government can do to control the flow. Tony Blair stumbled into this enormous social experiment with no plan, equating open borders with friendliness and modernity, and controls with so-called nasty Toryism.
Mr Brown wants to prove he is strong. He would be better being honest and admitting to the public that without a redrawing of the rules he can do little. It will require a brave leader to say it in polite but firm fashion: based on the evidence rather than the gut-instinct and crossed fingers of the last decade, this is the time for a reappraisal. Britain is a rich country and travel even for the world's poor is cheap, so we are a magnet. We should slow the numbers we allow in, and spend vastly more on controlling our island's sea-locked borders. For those of us already here, we will take the sensible view that the Americans took at the peak of their largest waves of immigration. A common language and respect for common institutions build a strong country best able to cope with upheaval.
Tony Blair wondered what his "legacy" would be, and it was in front of him all the time: a population explosion he did not plan for. Soon, we are all going to have to deal with the consequences.
Source
EXTRA CHARGE FOR LARGE VEHICLES ENTERING LONDON
I can't really disagree with this. Allowing huge vehicles into the narrow, congested steets of London where a small car would get you there as well does seem to require at least a charge. And anybody who can afford a monster vehicle should not be too victimized by such a charge
Britain is to be hit by its first "pollution charge" with owners of large cars taxed 25 pounds a day to drive into city centres. Up to a fifth of vehicles, including people carriers, 4x4s and luxury saloons, will be targeted by an emissions-based charge designed to penalise the highest-polluting vehicles. Smaller cars, such as diesel hatchbacks and hybrid vehicles that emit 120 grams or less of carbon dioxide per kilometre, will be exempt. Those emitting up to 225g/km would be charged 8 pounds Details of the new charge will be outlined this week by Ken Livingstone, the London mayor. It is set to be introduced in February.
The charge will be watched closely by at least 10 other cities considering their own levies, including Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester and Cambridge. Under current plans, drivers going into Manchester are likely to pay at least 5 pounds a day from 2012. Three borough councils in London have already introduced higher parking charges for fuel-inefficient vehicles.
The London congestion charge was introduced in 2003 to cut traffic but it has become less effective. Traffic fell 30% in the first year but is now only 8% below precharging levels. The levy is gradually being transformed into an environmental tax. Vehicle excise duty, the annual tax paid nationally by all drivers, has already been modified so high-polluting cars pay more.
The main losers under the new proposals will include thousands of drivers of larger vehicles living inside the congestion charge zone who are entitled to a 90% discount. In future, they would pay the same rate wherever they lived. This would mean someone living inside the zone and using a large car every day could pay 6,500 a year. A Transport for London spokesman said that "by making these changes to the congestion charging scheme we are encouraging people to take into account the impact of their choice of car on climate change."
Edmund King, executive director of the RAC Foundation, said: "The objective was meant to be reducing congestion, but now the goalposts are being changed and you have to question whether motorists are getting value for money." Citroen, which has 23 models each generating less than 120g/km, would benefit the most. A spokesman said: "Customers will no longer have to buy an electric car or even a small car to avoid charges. Low emission engines mean family-sized models like the C4 are exempt."
Source
British schools run by Islamic group Blair pledged to ban
Members of a radical Muslim group that Tony Blair promised to ban after the July 7 bombings have set up two schools in Britain to educate primary age children. The Islamic Shaksiyah Foundation, a registered charity that runs private schools in Haringey, north London, and in Slough in Berkshire, was established two years ago by female members of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Between them, the schools educate more than 100 children. A 2005 Ofsted inspection report for the school in Slough was glowing about its work, stating: “The school’s provision for the pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development is very good.”
The schools’ curriculum contains elements of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s ideology, which calls for the union of all Muslim states into a worldwide empire, the khilafah (caliphate).
Hundreds of Hizb ut-Tahrir supporters were gathering yesterday at the Alexandra Palace in north London for a conference on how to realise the khilafah. The group is also planning a global convention next Sunday for which it has booked a stadium with a capacity of 100,000 in Jakarta, Indonesia. The group has an estimated 2,000-4,000 active supporters in Britain and continues to operate openly despite Blair’s promise to proscribe it. Although Hizb ut-Tahrir states it is nonviolent, the organisation has radicalised a number of British Muslims who have gone on to commit terrorist acts after leaving the group. One is thought to be Omar Sharif, the Derby-born Muslim who tried to blow himself up outside a bar in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2003. His partner, Asif Hanif, killed three people in the suicide attack.
According to the Islamic Shaksiyah Foundation’s curriculum document, children aged 7-8 are taught “our rules and laws come from Allah” and asked to contrast Islam with “other belief systems where human beings make rules”. At age 9-10 children should be taught: “There must be one khali-fah [ruler of the caliphate].” Tahir Alam, education spokesman at the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), said he had seen the khilafah being taught as a historical subject, but never as an ideological principle. “I know a lot of schools up and down the country and I’ve never seen khilafah being taught [in this way] at any school,” said Alam. “We’re in Britain and we’re dealing with a curriculum that prepares you to be a citizen of this country so I don’t really see the relevance for why a school should have that scheme of work.”
The people running the schools, which opened about two years ago, have close links to some of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s most prominent members. Yusra Hamilton, proprietor of both schools and one of three members of the foundation’s board of trustees, has spoken at Hizb ut-Tahrir events and is the wife of Taji Mustapha, media spokesman for the organisation, whose name is Arabic for “party of Liberation”. Farah Ahmed, head teacher of the ISF’s Slough school and author of its religious curriculum, is the sister-in-law of Majid Nawaz, a British member of the party who was jailed and allegedly tortured by the Egyptian authorities in 2002 for spreading Hizb ut-Tahrir literature.
The author of the school’s history curriculum, Themina Ahmed, has previously written for Hizb ut-Tahrir about her hatred of western society and desire to see it destroyed. Ahmed wrote in the July 2001 issue of Khilafah Magazine: “The world will, insha-Allah [God willing], witness the death of the criminal capitalist nation of America and all other [infidel] states when the army of jihad is unleashed upon them.”
Anthony Glees, director of Brunel University’s centre for intelligence and security studies and author of a report on extremism on British campuses, warned: “This is a matter of grave concern. The government needs to take another look at proscribing Hizb ut-Tahrir.”
The party has operated in Britain since the mid-1980s but it is part of a much larger worldwide movement, founded in Palestine in 1953, that claims up to 10m supporters in 40 countries from Malaysia to Scandinavia. It is banned in Germany, Russia and throughout the Middle East because of its antisemitism and its stated aim to establish a global Islamic state. It also calls for the destruction of Israel and the reunion of all lands that were ever under Muslim rule — including parts of southern Spain — through jihad if necessary.
Until a month after the July 7 bombings, when the group became far more cautious following Blair’s pledge, it was possible to obtain antisemitic literature on the group’s British websites. One leaflet stated: “The Jews are a poisoned dagger thrust into the heart of the Islamic [nation], an evil cancerous gland which spreads deep within the Islamic countries.” A short paragraph with the heading “What can Muslims in Britain do to reestablish the khilafah” went on to state that Muslims in Britain “should not become integrated into the corrupt western society and accept their diseased notions of democracy freedom and capitalism”. Recently, it was claimed Hizb ut-Tahrir had tried to recruit one of the suspects in June’s alleged terrorist plot against targets in London and Glasgow.
One parent whose child had attended the Islamic Shaksiyah school in Haringey said most parents knew the teachers were from Hizb ut-Tahrir. Despite this parents enrolled their children because it was “very well run”. The parent said that even though the school gave a rudimentary education in Hizb ut-Tahrir, children were not pressurised into joining the group. She said teachers often invited parents to Hizb ut-Tahrir events and discussions to try to recruit them. Neither the foundation nor Hizb ut-Tahrir would reply to questions put to them. In a previous statement Hamilton has said the curriculum was a result of “comprehensive research” and denied that either school sought to propagate the views of Hizb ut-Tahrir. The Home Office said the issue of whether to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir was under “constant review.
Source
Only a government body could be this dumb
The number of maternity beds available for expectant mothers has fallen by almost 20 per cent over the past decade, despite an increase in the number of births on hospital wards. There are now about 1,900 fewer hospital beds for women giving birth than there were in 1997 in England, according to official figures obtained by the Conservatives and released yesterday.
Ten years ago there were 10,781 maternity beds, but in 2005-06 there were 8,883. The 18 per cent reduction cannot be explained by a small increase in the number of home births in recent years, as the number of hospital deliveries also rose; from 585,000 in 1997-98 to 593,400 in 2005-06. The statistics lend weight to claims that maternity services are becoming dangerously overstretched as they fail to keep pace with rising birth rates and an ever-increasing number of Caesarean sections.
Ministers have already admitted that the number of midwives fell last year – now, for the first time, the national reduction in maternity beds during the past decade is revealed. The Government was forced to deny that there was a maternity crisis this year when the National Patient Safety Agency examined 60,000 maternity ward errors in a three-year period ending last year. It found that 17,676 women had been injured, about 1,000 of them seriously.
Eight out of ten heads of midwifery say that they do not have sufficient staff to cope, according to the Royal College of Midwives. “We have seen too many service cuts, too many midwives lost, and too many mothers and babies getting a service that should shame the fourth richest country in the world,” Dame Karlene Davis, the RCM’s General Secretary, said this year.
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, released the figures as he promised a “bare-knuckle fight” to save local district hospitals threatened with closure because of NHS reorganisation. “There are 40 maternity units currently under threat and 90 accident and emergency units under threat,” Mr Cameron said on a visit to a hospital in his constituency yesterday. The Conservatives have chosen to take the battle over the future of local district hospitals to Gordon Brown after the man he selected to review the NHS suggested that many district hospitals should close. “We need fewer, more advanced and more specialised hospitals,” concluded Professor Ara Darzi after an investigation into London’s healthcare that he is now carrying out nationally.
A spokesman for the Department of Health denied that the review would lead to “wholesale closures of district hospitals”. “The NHS is also looking at the safest and most effective way of delivering care,” he said. “This does not mean wholesale closures of district general hospitals but it does mean that NHS clinicians and managers need to work with local communities to decide on the best organisation of services for patients in their areas. “Any decision on significant changes to services will be made only after full public consultation with local people.”
Source
Monday, August 06, 2007
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Boy Scouts banned from eating burgers and sausages - because of other people's religious beliefs
It was the glorious dawn of dibdibdobbing. A hundred years ago Lord Baden-Powell set out with 20 lads, his mission to teach them to hunt, light a fire and build shelter in the great outdoors. A century on, it seems the original flame of Boy Scouting is not burning quite so bright. For at a jamboree to mark the centenary of that original trip, there is no singing around the glowing embers of the camp fire - because there is no fire.
And you can't find a singed sausage for love nor money. However, there are veggie burgers aplenty. And a large potted plant, around which the Scouts of 2007 can gather and write down thoughts on how to achieve world peace. The location is Brownsea Island in Dorset, the starting point of Scouting where Lord Baden-Powell led the first expedition. Those young pioneers caught rabbits and then skinned and cooked them on an open fire.
Some 300 modern-day Scouts (the word Boy was dropped in the 1960s) settled down to a meal prepared in a 'kitchen marquee' and consisting entirely of vegetarian food - so as not to offend any religious faiths. Clare Haines, a spokesman for the Scout Association, said: "It was really to do with religion that we were not able to provide sausages and burgers and all that kind of food. "We have been very careful to make sure food is provided to everybody's tastes and beliefs, so no one feels left out. "They enjoyed their vegetarian meals, especially vegetable chilli, fresh salads and jacket potatoes."
She added that campfires had been banned on the National Trust-owned island after a massive woodland blaze 30 years ago.
However, Claire Barnes, a Scout leader from Rochester, Kent, said: "I can't believe anyone would have a problem with sausages or burgers. "I've been involved with the Scouts for 15 years and it's the first time I have ever heard anything like this. "We're proud of teaching our children about building fires - it's these basic survival skills which the movement is based on. "I can understand why they wanted to make everyone feel accepted but I think that's probably taking things a little too far."
The jamboree is one of many events being held to mark the Scouting 2007 Centenary. But for some, the Brownsea experience lacked the outdoors feel of a traditional camping experience. In the middle of the island stands a huge marquee fitted out with industrial ovens and fridges stocked with vegetarian food. Next to it is a large, covered canteen and stage where bands have performed in the evening during the five days of celebrations. There is also an Internet cafe set up with ten lap-top computers to allow home-sick youngsters to keep in touch with their families around the globe.
The Scouts sleep in single-sex tents scattered around the island and have the use of numerous wash tents and portable lavatories. Hundreds of solar powered lights line the walk ways across the island to avoid anyone tripping over tent pegs, and each cluster of tents is illuminated by strings of electric lights powered by generators.
David Massen, a Scout leader from Bradford, said last night: "A lot has changed with the way Scouting works since 1907. "The principles are still the same but society has changed. "For example, Baden-Powell could just take his Scouts out on a boat for a fishing trip, whereas if I want to do the same I have to take a two-hour training session and write a four-page risk assessment statement."
Source
Middle-class teenagers made the 'whipping boys' of British education
British class envy is as poisonous as ever
Middle-class teenagers are being turned into "whipping boys" as ministers discriminate against them in favour of students from poor homes, teachers warned. Education is being "dumbed down" as universities turn their attention towards easy subjects like surfing studies, beauty therapy and knitwear to attract more working-class students, it is claimed. In a fierce attack, the Professional Association of Teachers called for the Government to halt its drive towards so-called "social engineering".
The comments come amid controversy over policies designed to increase the number of university students from state schools and deprived backgrounds. Ministers want to see half of all school-leavers studying beyond the age of 18 and have given dons tough targets to attract "hard to reach" students. But Peter Morris, chairman of the PAT in Wales, accused ministers of "creating barriers in education based on social class".
Addressing the union's annual conference in Harrogate, he said: "I am angry because this Government has interfered with my children and their children's chances of getting a good education in this country. "They have changed the ways that examinations are assessed, and clearly this has had a 'dumbing down' effect on the academic standards, in order to get more pupils to achieve."
Under new rules, teenagers applying for university will be asked to say whether their parents have degrees in an attempt to attract more students from poor homes. But Mr Morris insisted it amounted to discrimination against middle-class pupils. "This political interfering with university applications clearly is designed to reduce the chances of hard-working applicants getting places," he said. "How can any academic institution make a selection of candidates for university courses based on the perceived social class of the parents? "The middle classes are becoming the new whipping boys for 'New Labour'."
Criticising the Government's education record, Mr Morris, a retired teacher from Swansea, said exams had gone from being academically rigorous to posing "woolly, touchy-feely" questions with little intellectual merit to act as a leg-up to the working classes. Courses such as physics, chemistry and maths have been replaced with "non-academic" degrees such as "surfing, beauty therapy, knitwear, circus skills, pig enterprise management, death studies, air guitar, David Beckham studies and wine studies", he said.
The comments come just days after universities were accused of cashing in on soft courses by plugging degrees in subjects such as complementary medicine. It was disclosed that applications for complementary medicine are up more than 31 per cent this year, while there has been a 19 per cent fall in applications to study anatomy, physiology and pathology.
Speaking at the PAT conference, Nardia Foster, a psychology teacher from Enfield, north London, said that Labour had created a more "fractured, divided, selfish society". "There is a lack of consistency, stability, moral integrity and fairness in our society," she said. "To dumb down declares to the whole world 'British children are stupid'."
Geraldine Everett, PAT chairman, said universities should not set "quotas" for admissions. "It is wrong to manufacture reasons to put one group forward ahead of another," she said. "It is an invasion of privacy to take account of parental background. Places should go on merit - not your parents' education."
Last month it emerged that leading institutions were actually taking fewer students from deprived areas - despite the Government's drive to redress their middle-class bias. Teenagers from wealthier families and private schools increased their hold on places at half of the 20 most sought-after universities, according to official figures.
A spokesman for the newly-formed Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "We are ensuring every child has the best possible start in life and the opportunity to succeed - nobody can argue with that. "New ways of raising standards in schools, such as progression and personalisation, will ensure that all pupils get the education they deserve to reach their full potential. And it is only right that we are also ensuring the opportunity of higher education is accessible to everyone who desires it." [Irrelevant waffle!]
Source
NHS kills two more patients
Understaffing makes this sort of thing a certainty.
Two cancer patients died after hospital staff gave them an overdose of a drug used to ease the side effects of chemotherapy. Baljit Singh Sunner, 36, and Paul Richards, 35, died within hours of each other after treatment in an oncology ward of Birmingham Heartlands Hospital on July 20. It is believed they were given up to five times the correct dose of medication.
The hospital confirmed that a “mistake” was made over the men’s treatment and said that it was carrying out a detailed investigation. A hospital spokesman said: “The doctor and two nurses involved have not been suspended but are currently not working within the area and are deeply upset by the deaths. “It has already been established that the two men received a higher dosage than normal. The coroner will look at whether the mistake made was directly responsible for the patients dying or a causational factor.”
In a statement, Mark Goldman, the hospital chief executive, said: “Following the deaths of two patients we are carrying out a detailed investigation into the clinical care given to them. This will be presented to both families and to the coroner, and it will form part of the coroner’s inquiries.”
Source
Doin' the Raghead Rag: "By now just about everyone has heard about "Jihad: The Musical", the hilarious stage send-up of Islamic terrorists being performed this month in Scotland. If you haven't, go watch this video at LGF; it made me laugh until the tears ran down my cheeks. And now - surprise, surprise! - members of a certain religious group have taken offense. A satirical musical about Islamist terrorism and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has sparked protests in Britain, with critics blasting it as tasteless. "Jihad: The Musical", which features songs including "I wanna be like Osama" and is described as "a madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism," is on at the Edinburgh Fringe festival this month.
It was the glorious dawn of dibdibdobbing. A hundred years ago Lord Baden-Powell set out with 20 lads, his mission to teach them to hunt, light a fire and build shelter in the great outdoors. A century on, it seems the original flame of Boy Scouting is not burning quite so bright. For at a jamboree to mark the centenary of that original trip, there is no singing around the glowing embers of the camp fire - because there is no fire.
And you can't find a singed sausage for love nor money. However, there are veggie burgers aplenty. And a large potted plant, around which the Scouts of 2007 can gather and write down thoughts on how to achieve world peace. The location is Brownsea Island in Dorset, the starting point of Scouting where Lord Baden-Powell led the first expedition. Those young pioneers caught rabbits and then skinned and cooked them on an open fire.
Some 300 modern-day Scouts (the word Boy was dropped in the 1960s) settled down to a meal prepared in a 'kitchen marquee' and consisting entirely of vegetarian food - so as not to offend any religious faiths. Clare Haines, a spokesman for the Scout Association, said: "It was really to do with religion that we were not able to provide sausages and burgers and all that kind of food. "We have been very careful to make sure food is provided to everybody's tastes and beliefs, so no one feels left out. "They enjoyed their vegetarian meals, especially vegetable chilli, fresh salads and jacket potatoes."
She added that campfires had been banned on the National Trust-owned island after a massive woodland blaze 30 years ago.
However, Claire Barnes, a Scout leader from Rochester, Kent, said: "I can't believe anyone would have a problem with sausages or burgers. "I've been involved with the Scouts for 15 years and it's the first time I have ever heard anything like this. "We're proud of teaching our children about building fires - it's these basic survival skills which the movement is based on. "I can understand why they wanted to make everyone feel accepted but I think that's probably taking things a little too far."
The jamboree is one of many events being held to mark the Scouting 2007 Centenary. But for some, the Brownsea experience lacked the outdoors feel of a traditional camping experience. In the middle of the island stands a huge marquee fitted out with industrial ovens and fridges stocked with vegetarian food. Next to it is a large, covered canteen and stage where bands have performed in the evening during the five days of celebrations. There is also an Internet cafe set up with ten lap-top computers to allow home-sick youngsters to keep in touch with their families around the globe.
The Scouts sleep in single-sex tents scattered around the island and have the use of numerous wash tents and portable lavatories. Hundreds of solar powered lights line the walk ways across the island to avoid anyone tripping over tent pegs, and each cluster of tents is illuminated by strings of electric lights powered by generators.
David Massen, a Scout leader from Bradford, said last night: "A lot has changed with the way Scouting works since 1907. "The principles are still the same but society has changed. "For example, Baden-Powell could just take his Scouts out on a boat for a fishing trip, whereas if I want to do the same I have to take a two-hour training session and write a four-page risk assessment statement."
Source
Middle-class teenagers made the 'whipping boys' of British education
British class envy is as poisonous as ever
Middle-class teenagers are being turned into "whipping boys" as ministers discriminate against them in favour of students from poor homes, teachers warned. Education is being "dumbed down" as universities turn their attention towards easy subjects like surfing studies, beauty therapy and knitwear to attract more working-class students, it is claimed. In a fierce attack, the Professional Association of Teachers called for the Government to halt its drive towards so-called "social engineering".
The comments come amid controversy over policies designed to increase the number of university students from state schools and deprived backgrounds. Ministers want to see half of all school-leavers studying beyond the age of 18 and have given dons tough targets to attract "hard to reach" students. But Peter Morris, chairman of the PAT in Wales, accused ministers of "creating barriers in education based on social class".
Addressing the union's annual conference in Harrogate, he said: "I am angry because this Government has interfered with my children and their children's chances of getting a good education in this country. "They have changed the ways that examinations are assessed, and clearly this has had a 'dumbing down' effect on the academic standards, in order to get more pupils to achieve."
Under new rules, teenagers applying for university will be asked to say whether their parents have degrees in an attempt to attract more students from poor homes. But Mr Morris insisted it amounted to discrimination against middle-class pupils. "This political interfering with university applications clearly is designed to reduce the chances of hard-working applicants getting places," he said. "How can any academic institution make a selection of candidates for university courses based on the perceived social class of the parents? "The middle classes are becoming the new whipping boys for 'New Labour'."
Criticising the Government's education record, Mr Morris, a retired teacher from Swansea, said exams had gone from being academically rigorous to posing "woolly, touchy-feely" questions with little intellectual merit to act as a leg-up to the working classes. Courses such as physics, chemistry and maths have been replaced with "non-academic" degrees such as "surfing, beauty therapy, knitwear, circus skills, pig enterprise management, death studies, air guitar, David Beckham studies and wine studies", he said.
The comments come just days after universities were accused of cashing in on soft courses by plugging degrees in subjects such as complementary medicine. It was disclosed that applications for complementary medicine are up more than 31 per cent this year, while there has been a 19 per cent fall in applications to study anatomy, physiology and pathology.
Speaking at the PAT conference, Nardia Foster, a psychology teacher from Enfield, north London, said that Labour had created a more "fractured, divided, selfish society". "There is a lack of consistency, stability, moral integrity and fairness in our society," she said. "To dumb down declares to the whole world 'British children are stupid'."
Geraldine Everett, PAT chairman, said universities should not set "quotas" for admissions. "It is wrong to manufacture reasons to put one group forward ahead of another," she said. "It is an invasion of privacy to take account of parental background. Places should go on merit - not your parents' education."
Last month it emerged that leading institutions were actually taking fewer students from deprived areas - despite the Government's drive to redress their middle-class bias. Teenagers from wealthier families and private schools increased their hold on places at half of the 20 most sought-after universities, according to official figures.
A spokesman for the newly-formed Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "We are ensuring every child has the best possible start in life and the opportunity to succeed - nobody can argue with that. "New ways of raising standards in schools, such as progression and personalisation, will ensure that all pupils get the education they deserve to reach their full potential. And it is only right that we are also ensuring the opportunity of higher education is accessible to everyone who desires it." [Irrelevant waffle!]
Source
NHS kills two more patients
Understaffing makes this sort of thing a certainty.
Two cancer patients died after hospital staff gave them an overdose of a drug used to ease the side effects of chemotherapy. Baljit Singh Sunner, 36, and Paul Richards, 35, died within hours of each other after treatment in an oncology ward of Birmingham Heartlands Hospital on July 20. It is believed they were given up to five times the correct dose of medication.
The hospital confirmed that a “mistake” was made over the men’s treatment and said that it was carrying out a detailed investigation. A hospital spokesman said: “The doctor and two nurses involved have not been suspended but are currently not working within the area and are deeply upset by the deaths. “It has already been established that the two men received a higher dosage than normal. The coroner will look at whether the mistake made was directly responsible for the patients dying or a causational factor.”
In a statement, Mark Goldman, the hospital chief executive, said: “Following the deaths of two patients we are carrying out a detailed investigation into the clinical care given to them. This will be presented to both families and to the coroner, and it will form part of the coroner’s inquiries.”
Source
Doin' the Raghead Rag: "By now just about everyone has heard about "Jihad: The Musical", the hilarious stage send-up of Islamic terrorists being performed this month in Scotland. If you haven't, go watch this video at LGF; it made me laugh until the tears ran down my cheeks. And now - surprise, surprise! - members of a certain religious group have taken offense. A satirical musical about Islamist terrorism and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has sparked protests in Britain, with critics blasting it as tasteless. "Jihad: The Musical", which features songs including "I wanna be like Osama" and is described as "a madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism," is on at the Edinburgh Fringe festival this month.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Attempt to Silence Government Critics in Britain
We read:
More slippery Leftist talk about race
The conclusion of a recent article by Matthew Syed in "The Times" is as follows: "The conclusion is unavoidable: those who invoke race as an explanation of real and perceived differences between humans have an agenda that is other than scientific"
How does he arrive at that conclusion? By pointing out, quite correctly, that there are well-known differences WITHIN races. West Africans are better at sprinting and East Africans are better at long-distance running, for instance. So therefore, he thinks, in a breathtaking overgeneralization, all talk of race is misleading.
That is an old quibble, however. While it is true that statements such as "Blacks make the best sprinters" are much less precise than they could be, they are nonetheless true statements -- as are other generalizations about race -- such as: "African-Americans commit violent crimes about 9 times as often as white Americans". Such statements are simple statements of fact and saying that anyone who utters such statements "has an agenda that is other than scientific" is just indulging in the usual fact-ignoring Leftist abuse.
Insofar as I can find any logic at all in Syed's pontification, I think he may be pointing out that what is true of any group is not necessarily true of all members in that group. I know of no-one who would dispute that, however, so Syed's attack is an attack on a straw man.
Syed also seems unaware that the usual racial classifications are well-reflected in the DNA of the people concerned. See e.g. here and here.
From his surname, I suspect that Syed is a Muslim. So let me give him another generalization to chew on: "The statements of prominent Muslims are not notable for their reliance on logic". That statement is of course a generalization and, as such, does not preclude some prominent Muslims from being very logical -- but Syed is clearly not one of those.
How the NHS "helps" the seriously ill elderly
Even clued-up people have great difficulty getting any help at all out of it
Today I phoned two GPs and asked them how soon my parents were likely to die. Do I hate my Mum and Dad? On the contrary, I adore them. My beloved and devoted parents are in their late eighties. January 3 this year was their 64th wedding anniversary. It was also two years almost to the day since they were forced to live apart.
In December 2004 they seemed fit and well, living comfortably and independently in their home of 40 years in the Midlands. We are a close and loving family and spend a lot of time together; I had noticed nothing seriously amiss. Then Dad fell over and cracked his head on a windowsill. There was a lot of blood. We spent Christmas Day gathered round his bed in an A&E unit 20 miles away. The hospital was hideous: uncaring, unkind, understaffed.
Dad had a chest infection and was very confused. He was also going through alcohol withdrawal – it turned out that his GP had known for a year that he was alcohol-dependent, but had been unable to convince him to get help.
We moved Mum in with me, 15 miles from her own home in the opposite direction from the hospital, while we all got over the shock. Another was to follow. Her forgetfulness was dementia. She asked the same question six times in 30 minutes. I had to label my kitchen cupboards and write out for her every night where she was and what was happening the next day. My sister Pam and I juggled our jobs with caring for Mum and visiting Dad, a two-hour round trip.
Exhausted by the distance, we got Dad moved to a private hospital in our town. He improved mentally and physically and was having physiotherapy to get him back on his feet. But soon his consultant told us that he no longer needed active medical treatment and his insurer declined to go on paying. We moved him to a short-term private nursing home. He deteriorated; his confusion returned, he repeatedly tried to get out of bed and fell, he developed leg ulcers and got MRSA. He became wheel-chair-bound and doubly incontinent. Then they too declined to keep him and advised us to look for a long-term nursing home.
Complete strangers to the welfare state, Pam and I turned to the internet to try to establish what financial help might be available. The answer seemed to be none, if my parents had substantial savings, which they did – Dad had astutely, or so he thought, raised 50,000 pounds recently via an equity release on their house and put it in the building society for their future care needs. So Pam and I visited six nursing homes in and around our town, all of them costing well over 600 a week. In four of them the smell of urine hit us as soon as the front door was opened. Dribbling residents were ranged round three sides of a sitting room while giant TV screens blared at them incessantly. Of the remaining two, one had a high turnover of foreign staff.
The only one that looked remotely civilised enough for a former international sales director was also the most expensive – more than £900 a week. We filled out a hugely detailed financial statement of his assets and income, confirmed that he was self-funding, and moved him in. Winter turned to spring. We moved Mum back to her own home, got her a referral to a memory consultant and, after much phoning, form-filling and investigating, found an agency to supply carers to visit her three times a day.
I tentatively contacted her social services office, having read on the internet that everyone is entitled to a needs assessment even if they are self-funding; they sent an ineffectual chap who told us little beyond agreeing that she was self-funding. I got back on the internet to find out what benefits she might nonetheless be entitled to; there were one or two, it transpired.
I called in on Mum as many weekday evenings as possible on my way home from work; Pam visited Dad as many afternoons as she could. At the weekends one of us collected Mum and took her to have lunch with Dad at the nursing home; the other one took her home again afterwards, a 90-minute round trip each time. Mum’s daily carers were variable and the agency was unreliable. Mum lost a lot of weight. My sister and I rang her every day; she was tearful and confused. We rang each other eight times a day: Have you seen Dad? Can you get to Mum – the agency can’t find anyone to visit tonight. Have you phoned their solicitor? Can you get to their building society? Have you rung Mum’s GP to organise a medicines box from the pharmacy (a friend of a friend told us about this)? Can you buy Dad more pyjamas? Who’s collecting Mum on Saturday? Have you rung social services? Can you look for a gardener and cleaner for Mum? Have you paid her chiropodist’s bill? Can we get together to fill out these funding forms tonight? Who’s taking a day off work this week to get her to the memory clinic?
We put our own lives and families on hold and irritated our work colleagues with the long list of phone calls we had to make day in, day out. It was relentless, depressing and utterly exhausting – and that was with two of us to share the load.
At Easter the nursing home rang – Dad had internal bleeding and an ambulance had been called. Another understaffed, uncaring hospital, another nightmare. He was pushed, pulled, prodded, hauled about. Somehow he survived and returned to the nursing home. The saintly staff wept when they saw the condition he was returned in – confused, dirty, and with his leg ulcers opened up again because the dressings hadn’t been changed.
I grabbed the chance of a week’s holiday. The day I arrived home Pam rang – Mum had had a fall at home and was on her way by ambulance to the same hospital that Dad had left three weeks before. It was just as grim. We watched the A&E clock tick round hour after hour while the staff gossiped at their station with their backs turned.
Eventually an X-ray showed a fractured pelvis. Our hearts sank. They put her to bed in a disgusting mixed ward. A nurse rang me late one night to say that my church mouse of a mother was trying to kill the other patients and could I go immediately. She was incoherent and trembling; I put my arms round her and we sat for four hours, into the small hours, in a cold corridor while a nurse phoned other wards trying to find the antipsychotic drug that they thought she needed. We were both crying. Nobody explained what was happening. (Much, much later I was told that she had a urinary tract infection that can induce psychosis in the elderly.)
Fit from years of tennis, Mum recovered physically and returned home. But spring turned to summer and her memory worsened. We went back to the internet and found another agency to supply live-in carers – mainly wonderful South African women who cooked her fresh food and played Scrabble with her. She put weight back on (but not before her own mother’s engagement ring slipped off her thin finger and was lost) and I felt confident enough to skip some weeknight visits, although I still phoned her every day.
Meanwhile, Dad was calmer at the nursing home. We found a wheelchair-transport charity that took him midweek to Mum while her carer cooked them both lunch. They were permanently distressed by their enforced separation but at least we knew that they were secure and well looked-after. Then the money ran out. By January 2006 they were broke – or, in the distasteful social services jargon, wealth-depleted. The 50,000 pounds had gone on nursing home and carer fees, as had the money we raised from Dad’s few stock holdings and an income bond.
Their only asset now was their house, their only income their state pensions and Dad’s two small occupational pensions. By the time we discovered (from the internet again, of course) that social services will step in when savings diminish to 20,500, they were already well below that and fast approaching the next threshold of 12,500. Both social services offices said they were now contributing the maximum, yet Mum and Dad still had a combined monthly short-fall of about 2,300 pounds. Moving Dad into a cheaper nursing home was unthinkable; he’d been shunted around enough. We appealed to the charitable trust that runs Dad’s wonderful home, and mercifully they agreed effectively to waive his top-up. Mum’s dementia appeared to be temporarily stalled with the aid of a memory drug, and she was secure and calm in her own home; my sister and I were managing between us to top up her finances to pay her live-in carers. By last autumn we were back on an even keel.
Then the next crisis hit. In January Mum had two strokes in succession and was taken back to hospital. She got a bed in another appalling, old-fashioned “Nightingale” mixed ward. She had lost the swallowing reflex, couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk. After four weeks on intravenous fluids, a stomach tube was inserted to feed her by. My sister and I bounced between Mum’s hospital and Dad’s nursing home. He was desperate to visit her but the hospital was unsurprisingly in the grip of a superbug and we couldn’t risk it.
Mum was gradually shunted to the farthest end of the ward from the nurses’ station. Sometimes she was hoisted from the bed to a chair and left unsupervised; once when I visited, in February, she was in the chair in bare feet and just her nightie, next to an open window. Mostly she had her eyes closed; occasionally she would look at us, but it was impossible to know if she knew who we were. Then the hospital started to ask what our plans for her were; they couldn’t do any more for her and she was bed-blocking. We had to decide between a nursing home and her own home. If we moved her into a nursing home, social services would then require us to sell the house after 12 weeks to pay for her care; as the house is jointly owned, Dad, too, would then be deemed to be self-funding again. At a combined rate of up to 1,800 a week for their nursing home fees, the money would soon be gone. We toyed with reuniting them in their own house, although we’d need to install a downstairs bathroom and hoisting equipment for Dad. He is wheelchair-bound, doubly incontinent and increasingly confused. He hasn’t seen Mum since her strokes, and we believe he would be devastated if he were faced daily with the reality of his adored wife’s pitiful condition. Better, we think, to keep him in the caring environment that has been his home for two years.
So we took Mum home. We bullied, cajoled and pleaded with assorted authorities to provide a hospital bed, a hoist, a pressure mattress, incontinence supplies, the food bags, visits from district nurses. My sister and I and her carers were taught how to administer her food, water and medicines via an electric pump and the stomach tube. She had a catheter but pulled it out twice, so now it stays out. I have acquired other skills too nauseating to describe.
The NHS has accepted her for continuing care, meaning that it takes over all the payments from social services, which should be cause for celebration; however, at the time of writing it has yet to devise a means of paying her live-in carers, as it seems it is against the rules for the NHS to make payments to individuals. The only suggestion forthcoming to date is that my sister and I might like to set up a company to which the NHS could make the payments. We being oddly disinclined to give ourselves this extra little burden, a stand-off has been reached. We are therefore still topping up the care package to the tune of 130 a week, although we are promised we will eventually be reimbursed by the NHS. My eyes water at the thought of the red tape that is going to involve.
So now I have two parents in a condition that can only be described as pitiful. My once-immaculate and elegant mother is shrunken, withered, bedbound, incontinent, unable to communicate, fed through a stomach tube; she has no teeth, her cheeks are sunken, her skin is grey, her eyes, when open, are rheumy and unfocused. She pulls her knees up to her chest and claws at her blankets.
My handsome, globe-trotting businessman father is in a wheelchair, confused, incontinent, speaks with difficulty and has recently had shingles that swelled up his face and closed up his eyes. They are both being kept alive by modern medicine far beyond the point of decency, humanity or dignity. Where is pneumonia, once called “the old man’s friend”, when you need it? You wouldn’t, you really wouldn’t, do it to a dog. I’m crying as I type these words, but if I had the courage I would pick up a pillow and help my mother towards that better life promised to Christians. Both their GPs are sympathetic to their, and our, plight, and both have agreed in principle to let nature take its course rather than strive officiously to keep them alive, but nature is taking its time. Hence my phone conversations with them today. Beyond reaffirming that agreement, however, they cannot help me.
I am so angry that we have arrived here. I am angry with Dad for not telling us about Mum’s dementia. I am angry with Mum for not telling us about Dad’s drinking. I am angry with myself for being powerless to make it all better for them with a wave of a magic wand. I am angry with the NHS for the disgraceful treatment of both my parents in two large hospitals. I am angry with the Government for its callous underfunding of care for the elderly. I am angry with social services for the apathy, the lack of help, the misleading or contradictory information that repeatedly dribbled our way. I am angry with God for drawing out their end in this demeaning way. If He does it to me, I shall sue.
Every single thing we have learnt about the care our parents have needed and its funding we have discovered slowly and with difficulty for ourselves, and often too late. (Example: when Dad’s nursing home fees had virtually wiped out the 50,000 he raised via equity release for them both, we approached his social services office for a financial assessment, and only then did they point out to us that the building society account was – most unusually – in Mum’s name, and so the money should never have been used for Dad’s fees. Our mistake, we hadn’t noticed – but we were amateurs, and we needed help, and none was forthcoming.) There is no quality to their lives, and little to mine and my sister’s for the past two and a half years that we have struggled to do our best for them. But the very, very worst thing is that our golden memories of two wonderful, loving parents have been all but obliterated by the sheer, unmitigated, unending misery of their last months on this earth.
Source
Eroded English liberties
In his first statement to Parliament as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown said: "Britain is rightly proud to be the pioneer of the modern liberties of the individual." Little noticed among the cascade of pronouncements about constitutional reform, was a promise to reconsider the ban on unlicensed political protest in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. Mr Brown implied that when it came to balancing the need for public order with the right to public dissent, this was a law too far.
A commitment to personal liberty is only to be expected from a British prime minister, and especially from a son of the manse brought up in Adam Smith's home town. Yet Mr Brown sat in a Cabinet that did more than any other in recent years to alter the balance in the relationship between the State and the individual.
If Clement Attlee is remembered for postwar welfare provision and the NHS, Harold Wilson for Sixties' optimism, Edward Heath for joining Europe, James Callaghan for the Winter of Discontent, Margaret Thatcher for reducing the size of government and John Major, however unfairly, for sleaze, then we will look back on the Blair years as marking a serial assault by the State on the civil liberties of the citizen.
The State always wants to limit the liberties of its people. But it is normally restrained by an executive that understands the limits of illiberalism or is contained by a Parliament that considers itself to be a guardian of freedoms. For a number of reasons, neither of these brakes was applied under Tony Blair's premiership. The huge Commons majority he enjoyed, the craven pusillanimity of his party, the implosion of the Conservatives and the consequent absence of opposition, other than in the Lords - and, to an extent, in the courts - conspired with a genuine, though irrational, fear of terrorism and rising street crime to let the State take greater control over the citizen than it has enjoyed before in modern peacetime.
Under Mr Blair, the State recaptured territory that it must have thought had been buried forever under a mountain of human rights laws and beneath all the freedoms that would normally make it more difficult to control the individual, such as ease of communication and of movement. But the technology that has made us feel freer has also given the State the wherewithal to keep control over us and to say that it does so for our own good.
This assault has come from many directions. Surveillance of a sophistication never dreamt of in Orwell's worst nightmares; the gradual dismantling of the judicial protections afforded to defendants in criminal cases, even to the point of questioning the presumption of innocence; the criminalisation of dozens of activities that would never previously have been considered unlawful; the limits on freedom of speech; restrictions on movement and detention without trial or even charge; and the creation of databases containing information on us all and which will track the movements of our children and theirs from cradle to grave.
As Mr Brown conceded in the Commons, freedom of expression is a basic liberty that risks being eroded, a statement that seems at odds with a world of incessant internet chatter and unrestrained blogging. Despite this, probably not since John Milton railed against restrictions on the press in the 17th century has this country been so confused about where the boundaries of free speech lie. People used to be free under the criminal law to speak their minds, provided they did not incite others to commit violence or infringe public order.
Speaker's Corner, in Hyde Park, London, came to symbolise a democratic tradition of which the country was proud and whose parameters were also understood. Rabble-rousers trying to whip up the mob have never been the beneficiaries of this latitude. Parliament Square was, rightly, off limits to rioters but a magnet for those who wanted to shout in the ear of their legislators. Now, unless permission is granted, it is not even possible to whisper criticism of the Government.
Maya Evans found this out when she stood by the Cenotaph to recite the names of Britain's Iraqi war dead. For this she was arrested, arraigned and left with a criminal record. It is hard to conceive of a police officer a generation ago taking any notice of her since she was causing no public order problem at all. But Ms Evans had fallen foul of a clause in the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act which established a one kilometre zone around the Palace of Westminster, within whose boundaries political criticism can be voiced only on application to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Or ask Lynette Burrows about free speech. She had offered her opinion on the radio that two homosexual men should not be allowed to adopt a boy, which is a view with which you may agree or disagree, but does not warrant a call from the local constabulary. She was told that, although a crime had not been committed, it was policy to record details of such complaints, so Mrs Burrows is now, presumably, on some sinister register of people who express views that are not considered acceptable. Needless to say, she was flabbergasted to receive such a call. "This is a free country and we are entitled to express opinions on matters of public interest," she said.
But are we a free country any longer? Were we ever? It is said, though less often now than it used to be, that the basis of English liberty is the rule of law, under which everything is allowed unless specifically prohibited. According to A.V. Dicey, the 19th-century constitutionalist, this was one of the features that distinguished England from its continental counterparts, where people were subject to the exercise of arbitrary power and were actions that where not specifically authorised were proscribed. Effectively, this principle limited the scope of the State to intervene in people's lives. Law set the boundaries of personal action but did not dictate the course of such action. Some limitations on personal freedom are introduced ostensibly for our own good and some, obviously, predate the Blair Government, such as the compulsory wearing of seat belts in cars and a requirement to wear a crash helmet on a motorbike; but, since 1997, the pace of proscription has grown alarmingly, encompassing smacking to smoking.
Another aspect of liberty is privacy. It may be hard to believe in a world where people crave televised notoriety that there are still many who cherish anonymity. In a truly free society it should be possible for someone who does not wish to come to the attention of the state to remain unnoticed provided he breaks no laws. As A. J. P. Taylor observed, before the First World War the average citizen's interaction with the Government was largely limited to paying tax. "He could live where he liked and as he liked," the great historian wrote. "He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission."
Of one thing he could be certain and that was the inviolability of his home. But recent research has uncovered 266 separate powers under which the police and other state agents can enter your home, often using force to do so.
The proliferation of state databases, again very much a recent development, has also rendered the concept of the private individual a thing of the past, and from the earliest age. We are, almost without realising it, becoming the most snooped-on democratic nation on earth, electronically tracked from cot to coffin, our most personal details to be stored for ever, all in the name of modernisation, efficiency and, we are told, our own good. When it comes to softening up the country for an ID card, the Home Office has been prepared to play a very long game. As Peter Lilley, the former minister who led the Cabinet revolt that resulted in the abandonment of the last ID scheme, observed: "There is no policy that has been hawked, unsold, around Whitehall for longer than identity cards. It was always brought to us as a solution looking for problems."
September 11 and the threat from international terrorism was the problem it had most been looking for. The dust was duly blown from the plan the Tories had rejected and resubmitted to the Blair administration, tweaked to reflect the latest justification for its disinterment and given the added lure that played to new Labour's modernistic fetishism: biometrics. Suddenly, ID cards became a panacea and civil liberties considerations were simply brushed aside. Ministers decreed that the argument had been won "in principle". Tony Blair emphasised the personal benefit of having a national identity system, as though it were being established solely for the benefit of the citizen, and merely facilitated by the State.
Yet even to conduct this debate exclusively around the practicalities of an ID card system is to find the arguments of ministers thoroughly unconvincing. Just because biometric technology is available does not justify fingerprinting the entire population, nor does it necessarily give us a secure identity. However sophisticated the system, there will be false matches and false nonmatches, and these increase in number the larger the database. The innocent will be most inconvenienced - or even criminalised - by these inevitable glitches, accused of being someone they are not or not accepted as who they are. Crooks will simply find a way of attacking the system, and the temptation to do so will be all the greater precisely because people are being falsely led to believe that it will be foolproof.
There are people who remember carrying the old wartime ID cards, scrapped in 1952, and cannot see what all the fuss is about. It is about the database, not the card. This is not about protecting our identities but about placing them at the disposal of the state and sundry other organisations that will have access to them. We are being asked to subscribe to an identity system that is insecure and will rarely fulfil the grand ambitions that ministers claim for it. Worse than that, it is increasingly being done on the cheap because the vast cost of the enterprise is gradually sinking it.
It is this extension of state control through the unfettered and unthinking deployment of modern surveillance technology and databases for which the Blair years (and those of his successor, unless he does something dramatic to change course) will most be remembered. Our children, and theirs, will be perplexed as to why their forebears came so easily, and with so little public debate, to allow the State to manipulate their lives.
Source
Thanks be unto mice
The number of scientific experiments conducted on animals has declined considerably over the past 30 years. The trend, however, has been reversed recently. The total has risen in each of the past five years and new data released by the Home Office this week show that the 2006 figure exceeded three million for the first time since 1991.
This has angered even the more considered elements of the animal rights lobby. The RSPCA pronounced itself furious and shocked, while the Dr Hadwen Trust, which supports medical research with nonanimal methods, blamed the Government's "ethical negligence". Its message was clear: scientists might talk about replacing, reducing and refining animal experiments, but this is mere lip service. The statistics tell a tale of more animal suffering.
This view might look compelling, but it is not founded in logic. A rise in the raw number of animal procedures does not necessarily mean that medical researchers are being cavalier. As it happens, the upward trend has a perfectly reasonable explanation that has nothing to do with callous indifference to animal welfare.
A close look at the Home Office figures makes this plain. The recent rise in animal use is almost entirely explained by the growing importance to science of genetically modified mice. The number of experiments that use these has more than quadrupled since 1995, to reach 1.04 million last year. One in three animal procedures now involves a GM mouse.
This headline figure, though, is a little misleading. The birth of every GM animal must be recorded as a scientific procedure in the Home Office statistics, even if it is never used in an experiment. Two-thirds are created purely to maintain breeding colonies or to provide cells, and are never given drugs or surgery. Many suffer no ill-effects from being genetically altered. Take them out of the equation and animal experiments would have continued to fall.
That said, it is beyond dispute that the number of GM animals used actively in research is rising and will continue to do so as more genes that influence disease come to light. But that is because these mice - and 97 per cent of GM animals are mice - allow scientists to answer medical questions that could not even have been asked a decade ago.
Conditions with a genetic contribution, such as diabetes, can now be modelled effectively by manipulating the genes of laboratory mice. These animals can then be used both to understand the disease process and to test new drugs. Such work is already having important results: treatments for incurable disorders such as muscular dystrophy that have been developed using GM mice are close to beginning clinical trials.
Such insights, regrettably, cannot be obtained in any other way. Scientists are using more GM mice not because they have become hard-hearted but because they are the best available tools for a certain kind of research of exceptional medical promise. From a patient perspective, the increasing number of GM mouse experiments is something to be welcomed. It means that science is closing in on the genetic origins of disease and thus on new approaches to therapy.
The development of nonanimal methods is of course welcome, and when such techniques have been validated it is right to use them. The number of nonGM animal procedures in research, indeed, has come down from 2.27 million in 1995 to 1.65 million last year. Further investment is appropriate, but too narrow a focus on reduction would mean abandoning new animal models just as they are becoming most useful. Science must be serious about both medical progress and animal welfare, but that may mean using more animals when necessary, and fewer when it is not.
Source
Britain's dangerous Keystone Cops: "Two years have elapsed since the de Menezes shooting. Since then the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has conducted two inquiries -- at a combined cost of 600,000 pounds -- and concluded that only one man can be held to account. None of the firearms officers who pulled the trigger has been charged with any offence. The surveillance officers who changed the police log to try to cover up their mistakes have not been reprimanded. The operational commanders who gave the order to shoot have, so far, not faced any disciplinary action. But the IPCC says that Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, head of Special Operations at Scotland Yard, should be disciplined. Mr Hayman must be held to account for failing to tell Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner, that there was mounting evidence that police had shot an innocent man. He is also accused of deliberately misleading the public by providing contradictory accounts of what he knew in press briefings."
We read:
"Royal Mail apologised last night for sending a letter warning postmasters that they risked losing thousands of pounds in compensation if they failed to stick to the official line on branch closures.
The letter from Sue Huggins, director of the Network Change Programme, came with questions that customers might ask and directions about how postmasters should respond. It said that undercover staff would be checking that they gave the approved answers. The letter read: "Representatives will visit branches at random to ensure these `key messages' are being delivered . . . Any compensation offered to you shall be subject to you having complied."
The Government plans to close 2,500 out of 14,300 post offices and compensation can be worth 60,000 pounds.
Source
More slippery Leftist talk about race
The conclusion of a recent article by Matthew Syed in "The Times" is as follows: "The conclusion is unavoidable: those who invoke race as an explanation of real and perceived differences between humans have an agenda that is other than scientific"
How does he arrive at that conclusion? By pointing out, quite correctly, that there are well-known differences WITHIN races. West Africans are better at sprinting and East Africans are better at long-distance running, for instance. So therefore, he thinks, in a breathtaking overgeneralization, all talk of race is misleading.
That is an old quibble, however. While it is true that statements such as "Blacks make the best sprinters" are much less precise than they could be, they are nonetheless true statements -- as are other generalizations about race -- such as: "African-Americans commit violent crimes about 9 times as often as white Americans". Such statements are simple statements of fact and saying that anyone who utters such statements "has an agenda that is other than scientific" is just indulging in the usual fact-ignoring Leftist abuse.
Insofar as I can find any logic at all in Syed's pontification, I think he may be pointing out that what is true of any group is not necessarily true of all members in that group. I know of no-one who would dispute that, however, so Syed's attack is an attack on a straw man.
Syed also seems unaware that the usual racial classifications are well-reflected in the DNA of the people concerned. See e.g. here and here.
From his surname, I suspect that Syed is a Muslim. So let me give him another generalization to chew on: "The statements of prominent Muslims are not notable for their reliance on logic". That statement is of course a generalization and, as such, does not preclude some prominent Muslims from being very logical -- but Syed is clearly not one of those.
How the NHS "helps" the seriously ill elderly
Even clued-up people have great difficulty getting any help at all out of it
Today I phoned two GPs and asked them how soon my parents were likely to die. Do I hate my Mum and Dad? On the contrary, I adore them. My beloved and devoted parents are in their late eighties. January 3 this year was their 64th wedding anniversary. It was also two years almost to the day since they were forced to live apart.
In December 2004 they seemed fit and well, living comfortably and independently in their home of 40 years in the Midlands. We are a close and loving family and spend a lot of time together; I had noticed nothing seriously amiss. Then Dad fell over and cracked his head on a windowsill. There was a lot of blood. We spent Christmas Day gathered round his bed in an A&E unit 20 miles away. The hospital was hideous: uncaring, unkind, understaffed.
Dad had a chest infection and was very confused. He was also going through alcohol withdrawal – it turned out that his GP had known for a year that he was alcohol-dependent, but had been unable to convince him to get help.
We moved Mum in with me, 15 miles from her own home in the opposite direction from the hospital, while we all got over the shock. Another was to follow. Her forgetfulness was dementia. She asked the same question six times in 30 minutes. I had to label my kitchen cupboards and write out for her every night where she was and what was happening the next day. My sister Pam and I juggled our jobs with caring for Mum and visiting Dad, a two-hour round trip.
Exhausted by the distance, we got Dad moved to a private hospital in our town. He improved mentally and physically and was having physiotherapy to get him back on his feet. But soon his consultant told us that he no longer needed active medical treatment and his insurer declined to go on paying. We moved him to a short-term private nursing home. He deteriorated; his confusion returned, he repeatedly tried to get out of bed and fell, he developed leg ulcers and got MRSA. He became wheel-chair-bound and doubly incontinent. Then they too declined to keep him and advised us to look for a long-term nursing home.
Complete strangers to the welfare state, Pam and I turned to the internet to try to establish what financial help might be available. The answer seemed to be none, if my parents had substantial savings, which they did – Dad had astutely, or so he thought, raised 50,000 pounds recently via an equity release on their house and put it in the building society for their future care needs. So Pam and I visited six nursing homes in and around our town, all of them costing well over 600 a week. In four of them the smell of urine hit us as soon as the front door was opened. Dribbling residents were ranged round three sides of a sitting room while giant TV screens blared at them incessantly. Of the remaining two, one had a high turnover of foreign staff.
The only one that looked remotely civilised enough for a former international sales director was also the most expensive – more than £900 a week. We filled out a hugely detailed financial statement of his assets and income, confirmed that he was self-funding, and moved him in. Winter turned to spring. We moved Mum back to her own home, got her a referral to a memory consultant and, after much phoning, form-filling and investigating, found an agency to supply carers to visit her three times a day.
I tentatively contacted her social services office, having read on the internet that everyone is entitled to a needs assessment even if they are self-funding; they sent an ineffectual chap who told us little beyond agreeing that she was self-funding. I got back on the internet to find out what benefits she might nonetheless be entitled to; there were one or two, it transpired.
I called in on Mum as many weekday evenings as possible on my way home from work; Pam visited Dad as many afternoons as she could. At the weekends one of us collected Mum and took her to have lunch with Dad at the nursing home; the other one took her home again afterwards, a 90-minute round trip each time. Mum’s daily carers were variable and the agency was unreliable. Mum lost a lot of weight. My sister and I rang her every day; she was tearful and confused. We rang each other eight times a day: Have you seen Dad? Can you get to Mum – the agency can’t find anyone to visit tonight. Have you phoned their solicitor? Can you get to their building society? Have you rung Mum’s GP to organise a medicines box from the pharmacy (a friend of a friend told us about this)? Can you buy Dad more pyjamas? Who’s collecting Mum on Saturday? Have you rung social services? Can you look for a gardener and cleaner for Mum? Have you paid her chiropodist’s bill? Can we get together to fill out these funding forms tonight? Who’s taking a day off work this week to get her to the memory clinic?
We put our own lives and families on hold and irritated our work colleagues with the long list of phone calls we had to make day in, day out. It was relentless, depressing and utterly exhausting – and that was with two of us to share the load.
At Easter the nursing home rang – Dad had internal bleeding and an ambulance had been called. Another understaffed, uncaring hospital, another nightmare. He was pushed, pulled, prodded, hauled about. Somehow he survived and returned to the nursing home. The saintly staff wept when they saw the condition he was returned in – confused, dirty, and with his leg ulcers opened up again because the dressings hadn’t been changed.
I grabbed the chance of a week’s holiday. The day I arrived home Pam rang – Mum had had a fall at home and was on her way by ambulance to the same hospital that Dad had left three weeks before. It was just as grim. We watched the A&E clock tick round hour after hour while the staff gossiped at their station with their backs turned.
Eventually an X-ray showed a fractured pelvis. Our hearts sank. They put her to bed in a disgusting mixed ward. A nurse rang me late one night to say that my church mouse of a mother was trying to kill the other patients and could I go immediately. She was incoherent and trembling; I put my arms round her and we sat for four hours, into the small hours, in a cold corridor while a nurse phoned other wards trying to find the antipsychotic drug that they thought she needed. We were both crying. Nobody explained what was happening. (Much, much later I was told that she had a urinary tract infection that can induce psychosis in the elderly.)
Fit from years of tennis, Mum recovered physically and returned home. But spring turned to summer and her memory worsened. We went back to the internet and found another agency to supply live-in carers – mainly wonderful South African women who cooked her fresh food and played Scrabble with her. She put weight back on (but not before her own mother’s engagement ring slipped off her thin finger and was lost) and I felt confident enough to skip some weeknight visits, although I still phoned her every day.
Meanwhile, Dad was calmer at the nursing home. We found a wheelchair-transport charity that took him midweek to Mum while her carer cooked them both lunch. They were permanently distressed by their enforced separation but at least we knew that they were secure and well looked-after. Then the money ran out. By January 2006 they were broke – or, in the distasteful social services jargon, wealth-depleted. The 50,000 pounds had gone on nursing home and carer fees, as had the money we raised from Dad’s few stock holdings and an income bond.
Their only asset now was their house, their only income their state pensions and Dad’s two small occupational pensions. By the time we discovered (from the internet again, of course) that social services will step in when savings diminish to 20,500, they were already well below that and fast approaching the next threshold of 12,500. Both social services offices said they were now contributing the maximum, yet Mum and Dad still had a combined monthly short-fall of about 2,300 pounds. Moving Dad into a cheaper nursing home was unthinkable; he’d been shunted around enough. We appealed to the charitable trust that runs Dad’s wonderful home, and mercifully they agreed effectively to waive his top-up. Mum’s dementia appeared to be temporarily stalled with the aid of a memory drug, and she was secure and calm in her own home; my sister and I were managing between us to top up her finances to pay her live-in carers. By last autumn we were back on an even keel.
Then the next crisis hit. In January Mum had two strokes in succession and was taken back to hospital. She got a bed in another appalling, old-fashioned “Nightingale” mixed ward. She had lost the swallowing reflex, couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk. After four weeks on intravenous fluids, a stomach tube was inserted to feed her by. My sister and I bounced between Mum’s hospital and Dad’s nursing home. He was desperate to visit her but the hospital was unsurprisingly in the grip of a superbug and we couldn’t risk it.
Mum was gradually shunted to the farthest end of the ward from the nurses’ station. Sometimes she was hoisted from the bed to a chair and left unsupervised; once when I visited, in February, she was in the chair in bare feet and just her nightie, next to an open window. Mostly she had her eyes closed; occasionally she would look at us, but it was impossible to know if she knew who we were. Then the hospital started to ask what our plans for her were; they couldn’t do any more for her and she was bed-blocking. We had to decide between a nursing home and her own home. If we moved her into a nursing home, social services would then require us to sell the house after 12 weeks to pay for her care; as the house is jointly owned, Dad, too, would then be deemed to be self-funding again. At a combined rate of up to 1,800 a week for their nursing home fees, the money would soon be gone. We toyed with reuniting them in their own house, although we’d need to install a downstairs bathroom and hoisting equipment for Dad. He is wheelchair-bound, doubly incontinent and increasingly confused. He hasn’t seen Mum since her strokes, and we believe he would be devastated if he were faced daily with the reality of his adored wife’s pitiful condition. Better, we think, to keep him in the caring environment that has been his home for two years.
So we took Mum home. We bullied, cajoled and pleaded with assorted authorities to provide a hospital bed, a hoist, a pressure mattress, incontinence supplies, the food bags, visits from district nurses. My sister and I and her carers were taught how to administer her food, water and medicines via an electric pump and the stomach tube. She had a catheter but pulled it out twice, so now it stays out. I have acquired other skills too nauseating to describe.
The NHS has accepted her for continuing care, meaning that it takes over all the payments from social services, which should be cause for celebration; however, at the time of writing it has yet to devise a means of paying her live-in carers, as it seems it is against the rules for the NHS to make payments to individuals. The only suggestion forthcoming to date is that my sister and I might like to set up a company to which the NHS could make the payments. We being oddly disinclined to give ourselves this extra little burden, a stand-off has been reached. We are therefore still topping up the care package to the tune of 130 a week, although we are promised we will eventually be reimbursed by the NHS. My eyes water at the thought of the red tape that is going to involve.
So now I have two parents in a condition that can only be described as pitiful. My once-immaculate and elegant mother is shrunken, withered, bedbound, incontinent, unable to communicate, fed through a stomach tube; she has no teeth, her cheeks are sunken, her skin is grey, her eyes, when open, are rheumy and unfocused. She pulls her knees up to her chest and claws at her blankets.
My handsome, globe-trotting businessman father is in a wheelchair, confused, incontinent, speaks with difficulty and has recently had shingles that swelled up his face and closed up his eyes. They are both being kept alive by modern medicine far beyond the point of decency, humanity or dignity. Where is pneumonia, once called “the old man’s friend”, when you need it? You wouldn’t, you really wouldn’t, do it to a dog. I’m crying as I type these words, but if I had the courage I would pick up a pillow and help my mother towards that better life promised to Christians. Both their GPs are sympathetic to their, and our, plight, and both have agreed in principle to let nature take its course rather than strive officiously to keep them alive, but nature is taking its time. Hence my phone conversations with them today. Beyond reaffirming that agreement, however, they cannot help me.
I am so angry that we have arrived here. I am angry with Dad for not telling us about Mum’s dementia. I am angry with Mum for not telling us about Dad’s drinking. I am angry with myself for being powerless to make it all better for them with a wave of a magic wand. I am angry with the NHS for the disgraceful treatment of both my parents in two large hospitals. I am angry with the Government for its callous underfunding of care for the elderly. I am angry with social services for the apathy, the lack of help, the misleading or contradictory information that repeatedly dribbled our way. I am angry with God for drawing out their end in this demeaning way. If He does it to me, I shall sue.
Every single thing we have learnt about the care our parents have needed and its funding we have discovered slowly and with difficulty for ourselves, and often too late. (Example: when Dad’s nursing home fees had virtually wiped out the 50,000 he raised via equity release for them both, we approached his social services office for a financial assessment, and only then did they point out to us that the building society account was – most unusually – in Mum’s name, and so the money should never have been used for Dad’s fees. Our mistake, we hadn’t noticed – but we were amateurs, and we needed help, and none was forthcoming.) There is no quality to their lives, and little to mine and my sister’s for the past two and a half years that we have struggled to do our best for them. But the very, very worst thing is that our golden memories of two wonderful, loving parents have been all but obliterated by the sheer, unmitigated, unending misery of their last months on this earth.
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Eroded English liberties
In his first statement to Parliament as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown said: "Britain is rightly proud to be the pioneer of the modern liberties of the individual." Little noticed among the cascade of pronouncements about constitutional reform, was a promise to reconsider the ban on unlicensed political protest in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. Mr Brown implied that when it came to balancing the need for public order with the right to public dissent, this was a law too far.
A commitment to personal liberty is only to be expected from a British prime minister, and especially from a son of the manse brought up in Adam Smith's home town. Yet Mr Brown sat in a Cabinet that did more than any other in recent years to alter the balance in the relationship between the State and the individual.
If Clement Attlee is remembered for postwar welfare provision and the NHS, Harold Wilson for Sixties' optimism, Edward Heath for joining Europe, James Callaghan for the Winter of Discontent, Margaret Thatcher for reducing the size of government and John Major, however unfairly, for sleaze, then we will look back on the Blair years as marking a serial assault by the State on the civil liberties of the citizen.
The State always wants to limit the liberties of its people. But it is normally restrained by an executive that understands the limits of illiberalism or is contained by a Parliament that considers itself to be a guardian of freedoms. For a number of reasons, neither of these brakes was applied under Tony Blair's premiership. The huge Commons majority he enjoyed, the craven pusillanimity of his party, the implosion of the Conservatives and the consequent absence of opposition, other than in the Lords - and, to an extent, in the courts - conspired with a genuine, though irrational, fear of terrorism and rising street crime to let the State take greater control over the citizen than it has enjoyed before in modern peacetime.
Under Mr Blair, the State recaptured territory that it must have thought had been buried forever under a mountain of human rights laws and beneath all the freedoms that would normally make it more difficult to control the individual, such as ease of communication and of movement. But the technology that has made us feel freer has also given the State the wherewithal to keep control over us and to say that it does so for our own good.
This assault has come from many directions. Surveillance of a sophistication never dreamt of in Orwell's worst nightmares; the gradual dismantling of the judicial protections afforded to defendants in criminal cases, even to the point of questioning the presumption of innocence; the criminalisation of dozens of activities that would never previously have been considered unlawful; the limits on freedom of speech; restrictions on movement and detention without trial or even charge; and the creation of databases containing information on us all and which will track the movements of our children and theirs from cradle to grave.
As Mr Brown conceded in the Commons, freedom of expression is a basic liberty that risks being eroded, a statement that seems at odds with a world of incessant internet chatter and unrestrained blogging. Despite this, probably not since John Milton railed against restrictions on the press in the 17th century has this country been so confused about where the boundaries of free speech lie. People used to be free under the criminal law to speak their minds, provided they did not incite others to commit violence or infringe public order.
Speaker's Corner, in Hyde Park, London, came to symbolise a democratic tradition of which the country was proud and whose parameters were also understood. Rabble-rousers trying to whip up the mob have never been the beneficiaries of this latitude. Parliament Square was, rightly, off limits to rioters but a magnet for those who wanted to shout in the ear of their legislators. Now, unless permission is granted, it is not even possible to whisper criticism of the Government.
Maya Evans found this out when she stood by the Cenotaph to recite the names of Britain's Iraqi war dead. For this she was arrested, arraigned and left with a criminal record. It is hard to conceive of a police officer a generation ago taking any notice of her since she was causing no public order problem at all. But Ms Evans had fallen foul of a clause in the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act which established a one kilometre zone around the Palace of Westminster, within whose boundaries political criticism can be voiced only on application to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Or ask Lynette Burrows about free speech. She had offered her opinion on the radio that two homosexual men should not be allowed to adopt a boy, which is a view with which you may agree or disagree, but does not warrant a call from the local constabulary. She was told that, although a crime had not been committed, it was policy to record details of such complaints, so Mrs Burrows is now, presumably, on some sinister register of people who express views that are not considered acceptable. Needless to say, she was flabbergasted to receive such a call. "This is a free country and we are entitled to express opinions on matters of public interest," she said.
But are we a free country any longer? Were we ever? It is said, though less often now than it used to be, that the basis of English liberty is the rule of law, under which everything is allowed unless specifically prohibited. According to A.V. Dicey, the 19th-century constitutionalist, this was one of the features that distinguished England from its continental counterparts, where people were subject to the exercise of arbitrary power and were actions that where not specifically authorised were proscribed. Effectively, this principle limited the scope of the State to intervene in people's lives. Law set the boundaries of personal action but did not dictate the course of such action. Some limitations on personal freedom are introduced ostensibly for our own good and some, obviously, predate the Blair Government, such as the compulsory wearing of seat belts in cars and a requirement to wear a crash helmet on a motorbike; but, since 1997, the pace of proscription has grown alarmingly, encompassing smacking to smoking.
Another aspect of liberty is privacy. It may be hard to believe in a world where people crave televised notoriety that there are still many who cherish anonymity. In a truly free society it should be possible for someone who does not wish to come to the attention of the state to remain unnoticed provided he breaks no laws. As A. J. P. Taylor observed, before the First World War the average citizen's interaction with the Government was largely limited to paying tax. "He could live where he liked and as he liked," the great historian wrote. "He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission."
Of one thing he could be certain and that was the inviolability of his home. But recent research has uncovered 266 separate powers under which the police and other state agents can enter your home, often using force to do so.
The proliferation of state databases, again very much a recent development, has also rendered the concept of the private individual a thing of the past, and from the earliest age. We are, almost without realising it, becoming the most snooped-on democratic nation on earth, electronically tracked from cot to coffin, our most personal details to be stored for ever, all in the name of modernisation, efficiency and, we are told, our own good. When it comes to softening up the country for an ID card, the Home Office has been prepared to play a very long game. As Peter Lilley, the former minister who led the Cabinet revolt that resulted in the abandonment of the last ID scheme, observed: "There is no policy that has been hawked, unsold, around Whitehall for longer than identity cards. It was always brought to us as a solution looking for problems."
September 11 and the threat from international terrorism was the problem it had most been looking for. The dust was duly blown from the plan the Tories had rejected and resubmitted to the Blair administration, tweaked to reflect the latest justification for its disinterment and given the added lure that played to new Labour's modernistic fetishism: biometrics. Suddenly, ID cards became a panacea and civil liberties considerations were simply brushed aside. Ministers decreed that the argument had been won "in principle". Tony Blair emphasised the personal benefit of having a national identity system, as though it were being established solely for the benefit of the citizen, and merely facilitated by the State.
Yet even to conduct this debate exclusively around the practicalities of an ID card system is to find the arguments of ministers thoroughly unconvincing. Just because biometric technology is available does not justify fingerprinting the entire population, nor does it necessarily give us a secure identity. However sophisticated the system, there will be false matches and false nonmatches, and these increase in number the larger the database. The innocent will be most inconvenienced - or even criminalised - by these inevitable glitches, accused of being someone they are not or not accepted as who they are. Crooks will simply find a way of attacking the system, and the temptation to do so will be all the greater precisely because people are being falsely led to believe that it will be foolproof.
There are people who remember carrying the old wartime ID cards, scrapped in 1952, and cannot see what all the fuss is about. It is about the database, not the card. This is not about protecting our identities but about placing them at the disposal of the state and sundry other organisations that will have access to them. We are being asked to subscribe to an identity system that is insecure and will rarely fulfil the grand ambitions that ministers claim for it. Worse than that, it is increasingly being done on the cheap because the vast cost of the enterprise is gradually sinking it.
It is this extension of state control through the unfettered and unthinking deployment of modern surveillance technology and databases for which the Blair years (and those of his successor, unless he does something dramatic to change course) will most be remembered. Our children, and theirs, will be perplexed as to why their forebears came so easily, and with so little public debate, to allow the State to manipulate their lives.
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Thanks be unto mice
The number of scientific experiments conducted on animals has declined considerably over the past 30 years. The trend, however, has been reversed recently. The total has risen in each of the past five years and new data released by the Home Office this week show that the 2006 figure exceeded three million for the first time since 1991.
This has angered even the more considered elements of the animal rights lobby. The RSPCA pronounced itself furious and shocked, while the Dr Hadwen Trust, which supports medical research with nonanimal methods, blamed the Government's "ethical negligence". Its message was clear: scientists might talk about replacing, reducing and refining animal experiments, but this is mere lip service. The statistics tell a tale of more animal suffering.
This view might look compelling, but it is not founded in logic. A rise in the raw number of animal procedures does not necessarily mean that medical researchers are being cavalier. As it happens, the upward trend has a perfectly reasonable explanation that has nothing to do with callous indifference to animal welfare.
A close look at the Home Office figures makes this plain. The recent rise in animal use is almost entirely explained by the growing importance to science of genetically modified mice. The number of experiments that use these has more than quadrupled since 1995, to reach 1.04 million last year. One in three animal procedures now involves a GM mouse.
This headline figure, though, is a little misleading. The birth of every GM animal must be recorded as a scientific procedure in the Home Office statistics, even if it is never used in an experiment. Two-thirds are created purely to maintain breeding colonies or to provide cells, and are never given drugs or surgery. Many suffer no ill-effects from being genetically altered. Take them out of the equation and animal experiments would have continued to fall.
That said, it is beyond dispute that the number of GM animals used actively in research is rising and will continue to do so as more genes that influence disease come to light. But that is because these mice - and 97 per cent of GM animals are mice - allow scientists to answer medical questions that could not even have been asked a decade ago.
Conditions with a genetic contribution, such as diabetes, can now be modelled effectively by manipulating the genes of laboratory mice. These animals can then be used both to understand the disease process and to test new drugs. Such work is already having important results: treatments for incurable disorders such as muscular dystrophy that have been developed using GM mice are close to beginning clinical trials.
Such insights, regrettably, cannot be obtained in any other way. Scientists are using more GM mice not because they have become hard-hearted but because they are the best available tools for a certain kind of research of exceptional medical promise. From a patient perspective, the increasing number of GM mouse experiments is something to be welcomed. It means that science is closing in on the genetic origins of disease and thus on new approaches to therapy.
The development of nonanimal methods is of course welcome, and when such techniques have been validated it is right to use them. The number of nonGM animal procedures in research, indeed, has come down from 2.27 million in 1995 to 1.65 million last year. Further investment is appropriate, but too narrow a focus on reduction would mean abandoning new animal models just as they are becoming most useful. Science must be serious about both medical progress and animal welfare, but that may mean using more animals when necessary, and fewer when it is not.
Source
Britain's dangerous Keystone Cops: "Two years have elapsed since the de Menezes shooting. Since then the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has conducted two inquiries -- at a combined cost of 600,000 pounds -- and concluded that only one man can be held to account. None of the firearms officers who pulled the trigger has been charged with any offence. The surveillance officers who changed the police log to try to cover up their mistakes have not been reprimanded. The operational commanders who gave the order to shoot have, so far, not faced any disciplinary action. But the IPCC says that Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, head of Special Operations at Scotland Yard, should be disciplined. Mr Hayman must be held to account for failing to tell Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner, that there was mounting evidence that police had shot an innocent man. He is also accused of deliberately misleading the public by providing contradictory accounts of what he knew in press briefings."
Friday, August 03, 2007
Disgraceful treatment of Gurkhas by British bureaucrats
Men who have put their lives on the line for Britain do not have "strong ties" to Britain?? Absurd. The Gurkhas are much admired in Britain so this is just bureaucratic nastiness. The Gurkhas have even been allowed to stand guard at Buckingham Palace -- a great honour. If they were useless Sudanese refugees they would be very welcome, of course
A group of Gurkhas went to court in London on Wednesday fighting for the right of some 2,000 of the Nepalese veterans to settle in Britain. About 20 of them, many wearing military regalia, attended a hearing of the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal in a test case for Gurkhas who have fought alongside British soldiers.
Under current rules, serving Gurkhas now are almost all given the right to settle in Britain after completing their army service. But those who retired before 1997 have to rely on the discretion of British immigration officials, with the result that some 400 have been rejected because they do not have "strong ties" with Britain.
Lawyer David Enright, representing 44 of them, argued in court that someone who is prepared to die in battle for Britain should have the right to settle in the country. Specifically he said Britain should take into account "war wounds, decorations when in battle, swearing allegiance to the Crown, swearing allegiance for decades, fighting a battle, being injured, guarding the Queen the way your fathers and grandfathers served the Queen, paying income tax. "You cannot find a stronger way to link with the UK. All these are strong ties with the UK and should be considered in the particular circumstances of the Gurkhas who have rendered such sterling service for over 200 years."
Around 200,000 Gurkhas fought for Britain in the World Wars I and II; some 43,000 were killed or wounded. There are around 3,500 Gurkhas serving in the British army nowadays. The British first became aware of the Gurkhas in 1815 when they sent an expeditionary force to try and take over the hilly region of Gorkha in what is now central Nepal. Impressed by their fierceness, loyalty and razor-sharp kukhuri fighting knives, the British army began to recruit the hill warriors and the Gurkhas have fought in nearly every major British military engagement since. The hearing continues.
Source
Zebrafish study may point way to blindness cure
The ability of zebrafish to regenerate damaged retinas has given scientists a clue about restoring human vision and could lead to an experimental treatment for blindness within five years.
British researchers said on Wednesday they had successfully grown in the laboratory a type of adult stem cell found in the eyes of both fish and mammals that develops into neurons in the retina.
In future, these cells could be injected into the eye as a treatment for diseases such as macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetes-related blindness, according to Astrid Limb of University College London's (UCL) Institute of Ophthalmology.
Damage to the retina -- the part of the eye that sends messages to the brain -- is responsible for most cases of sight loss. "Our findings have enormous potential," Limb said. "It could help in all diseases where the neurons are damaged, which is basically nearly every disease of the eye."
Limb and her colleagues studied so-called Mueller glial cells in the eyes of people aged from 18 months to 91 years and found they were able to develop them into all types of neurons found in the retina. They were also able to grow them easily in the lab, they reported in the journal Stem Cells.
The cells have already been tested in rats with diseased retinas, where they successfully migrated into the retina and took on the characteristics of the surrounding neurons. Now the team is working on the same approach in humans. "We very much hope that we could do autologous transplants within five years," Limb told Reuters.
Autologous transplants, initially on a trial basis, will involve manipulating cells and injecting them back into an individual's own eye. Eventually, Limb hopes it will also be possible to transfer the cells between different people. "Because they are so easy to grow, we could make stem cell banks and have cell lines available to the general population, subject to typing as with blood transfusions," she said.
Just why zebrafish have an abundant supply of adult stem cells to regenerate their retinas, while they are rare in mammals, remains a mystery but Limb suspects it is because mammals have a limiting system to stop proliferation.
The new work on Mueller glial cells is the latest example of researchers exploring the potential of different kinds of stem cells in treating eye disease. Another team from UCL and Moorfield's Eye Hospital said in June they aimed to repair damaged retinas with cells derived from embryonic stem cells.
Source
The world's least favourite airline: "British Airways has been named as the worst performing of all Europe's major airlines, with its passengers more likely to face delays than those on any other airline. Between April and June, 35.7 per cent of short or medium haul flights did not arrive on time and 32.7 per cent were delayed on departure, according to a report by the Association of European Airlines (AEA). The airline's performance on long haul flights was even worse with 44 per cent of these arriving late and 36.6 per cent departing later than scheduled. The figures come after BA was fined almost 270 million pounds ($646m) for price fixing after colluding over fuel surcharges with Virgin Atlantic. AEA said that for every 1000 passengers travelling in the three months between April and June, an average of 28 bags were delayed on BA flights compared with around three bags for every 1000 Air Malta travellers"
Men who have put their lives on the line for Britain do not have "strong ties" to Britain?? Absurd. The Gurkhas are much admired in Britain so this is just bureaucratic nastiness. The Gurkhas have even been allowed to stand guard at Buckingham Palace -- a great honour. If they were useless Sudanese refugees they would be very welcome, of course
A group of Gurkhas went to court in London on Wednesday fighting for the right of some 2,000 of the Nepalese veterans to settle in Britain. About 20 of them, many wearing military regalia, attended a hearing of the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal in a test case for Gurkhas who have fought alongside British soldiers.
Under current rules, serving Gurkhas now are almost all given the right to settle in Britain after completing their army service. But those who retired before 1997 have to rely on the discretion of British immigration officials, with the result that some 400 have been rejected because they do not have "strong ties" with Britain.
Lawyer David Enright, representing 44 of them, argued in court that someone who is prepared to die in battle for Britain should have the right to settle in the country. Specifically he said Britain should take into account "war wounds, decorations when in battle, swearing allegiance to the Crown, swearing allegiance for decades, fighting a battle, being injured, guarding the Queen the way your fathers and grandfathers served the Queen, paying income tax. "You cannot find a stronger way to link with the UK. All these are strong ties with the UK and should be considered in the particular circumstances of the Gurkhas who have rendered such sterling service for over 200 years."
Around 200,000 Gurkhas fought for Britain in the World Wars I and II; some 43,000 were killed or wounded. There are around 3,500 Gurkhas serving in the British army nowadays. The British first became aware of the Gurkhas in 1815 when they sent an expeditionary force to try and take over the hilly region of Gorkha in what is now central Nepal. Impressed by their fierceness, loyalty and razor-sharp kukhuri fighting knives, the British army began to recruit the hill warriors and the Gurkhas have fought in nearly every major British military engagement since. The hearing continues.
Source
Zebrafish study may point way to blindness cure
The ability of zebrafish to regenerate damaged retinas has given scientists a clue about restoring human vision and could lead to an experimental treatment for blindness within five years.
British researchers said on Wednesday they had successfully grown in the laboratory a type of adult stem cell found in the eyes of both fish and mammals that develops into neurons in the retina.
In future, these cells could be injected into the eye as a treatment for diseases such as macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetes-related blindness, according to Astrid Limb of University College London's (UCL) Institute of Ophthalmology.
Damage to the retina -- the part of the eye that sends messages to the brain -- is responsible for most cases of sight loss. "Our findings have enormous potential," Limb said. "It could help in all diseases where the neurons are damaged, which is basically nearly every disease of the eye."
Limb and her colleagues studied so-called Mueller glial cells in the eyes of people aged from 18 months to 91 years and found they were able to develop them into all types of neurons found in the retina. They were also able to grow them easily in the lab, they reported in the journal Stem Cells.
The cells have already been tested in rats with diseased retinas, where they successfully migrated into the retina and took on the characteristics of the surrounding neurons. Now the team is working on the same approach in humans. "We very much hope that we could do autologous transplants within five years," Limb told Reuters.
Autologous transplants, initially on a trial basis, will involve manipulating cells and injecting them back into an individual's own eye. Eventually, Limb hopes it will also be possible to transfer the cells between different people. "Because they are so easy to grow, we could make stem cell banks and have cell lines available to the general population, subject to typing as with blood transfusions," she said.
Just why zebrafish have an abundant supply of adult stem cells to regenerate their retinas, while they are rare in mammals, remains a mystery but Limb suspects it is because mammals have a limiting system to stop proliferation.
The new work on Mueller glial cells is the latest example of researchers exploring the potential of different kinds of stem cells in treating eye disease. Another team from UCL and Moorfield's Eye Hospital said in June they aimed to repair damaged retinas with cells derived from embryonic stem cells.
Source
The world's least favourite airline: "British Airways has been named as the worst performing of all Europe's major airlines, with its passengers more likely to face delays than those on any other airline. Between April and June, 35.7 per cent of short or medium haul flights did not arrive on time and 32.7 per cent were delayed on departure, according to a report by the Association of European Airlines (AEA). The airline's performance on long haul flights was even worse with 44 per cent of these arriving late and 36.6 per cent departing later than scheduled. The figures come after BA was fined almost 270 million pounds ($646m) for price fixing after colluding over fuel surcharges with Virgin Atlantic. AEA said that for every 1000 passengers travelling in the three months between April and June, an average of 28 bags were delayed on BA flights compared with around three bags for every 1000 Air Malta travellers"
Thursday, August 02, 2007
NHS neglects kids
Children with cancer are less likely to survive in Britain than in other European countries, two specialists have claimed. The reason could be slower detection of the cancers or less aggressive treatment once they are diagnosed, according to Alan Craft, of the Institute of Child Health at Newcastle University, and Kathy Pritchard-Jones, of the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, southwest London.
Writing in The Lancet Oncology, Professor Craft and Professor Pritchard-Jones say that, despite a National Service Framework for Children that sets standards for care, there are no targets and children "continue to be a low priority for the NHS".
They highlight trials carried out on Wilms's tumour - a childhood condition - in Germany, which showed that, between 1994 and 2001, 27.4 per cent of patients had a cancer that was first identified during a visit to a health professional for an unrelated problem, or by routine surveillance.
By comparison, in Britain, only 11 per cent of patients treated at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London, and 4 per cent of those referred to Newcastle General Hospital or the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, were identified in this way. This suggests that GPs, and possibly some specialists, are slow to detect the cancers, thereby delaying treatment. In Germany, early diagnosis by routine or incidental examination is linked to increased survival, they say.
Routine health surveillance systems and opportunities for diagnosis for children may also be worse in Britain. In Germany most children have a primary-care paediatrician who provides regular check-ups, whereas in Britain the guidelines are not as thorough, the authors say. They conclude: "Sub-optimum survival for childhood cancer is just one example of the worse state of children's healthcare in the UK compared with many other countries. "The perinatal mortality rate puts the UK in fifteenth position in Europe and there is clear evidence that children with diabetes are [also] not receiving optimum care."
However, Professor Alex Markham, a former chief executive of Cancer Research UK and now its senior medical adviser, said that overall survival rates from childhood cancer in Britain had reached 77 per cent, and for some types of the disease survival was more than 90 per cent. "The data discussed in this comment in Lancet Oncology were collected between 1977 and 1997. Some of these apparent survival differences might be down to variations in the way data are collected in different countries," he said.
Roisin Trehy, senior nurse with Cancerbackup, said: "Any evidence to suggest that children are not a health priority is hugely concerning. However, this research does not seem to take account of the fact that, until the end of the trial period in 1997, the UK did not have a multidisciplinary team approach to cancer care."
Source
Britain's "New Labour" flushed liberty down the toilet
Chris Atkins, director of Taking Liberties, talks about freedom, fear and how the government is making us all `stand in the naughty corner'
Freedom has become a dirty word. So dirty, in fact, that there is now a brand of toilet paper called `Freedom'. Seriously. You can buy it at Tesco. It's light blue, perfumed and it has the word `Freedom' emblazoned across its packaging. What's that all about? Freedom from skidmarks? `Man's butt cheeks are born clean, but everywhere they are being stained!' You can now literally wipe your arse with `Freedom'.
When the f-word is not being used to advertise all manner of toilet products (you can also enjoy `Freedom Tampons' or liberate the whiffy bits of your home with an air freshener called `Freedom in Fragrance'), it is being bastardised to mean its precise opposite. The war on terror promises us `freedom from fear'. This actually means sacrificing free speech, free movement and universal legal principles such as Habeas Corpus, in the name of countering the threat posed by a conspiracy of dunces: that ragbag collection of overgrown, woe-is-us Islamist-adultescents who occasionally throw terror tantrums (or at least they would, if they knew how to wire a car bomb properly).
The authorities recently granted us `smokefreedom'. Graciously, and with all the tender loving care of a kindly big brother, the New Labour government made our lives `smokefree' by banning the lighting-up of cigarettes in any building or space or bus-stop or black taxi or even home that can reasonably be described as a `place of work'. (And yes, it's the lighting up that is the crime. Like Bill Clinton, you don't have to have inhaled in order to be shopped to the cops by members of the public, who are being encouraged by state propaganda to squeal on smokers by calling the `smokefree hotline'.) `Smokefree' takes Newspeak to a new level: the intrusion of the government into every corner of every pub, club and restaurant in the land - more than that, its intrusion into the decisions we make about what to ingest into our bodies - is celebrated as a new liberty, as `smokefreedom': the Right Not to Cough.
We live in an era of Doublespeak. In Britain, `freedom' is proclaimed from the rooftops, while our real freedoms to protest, speak openly and choose how we wish to live our lives are going up in smoke. Everywhere you look, the f-word is celebrated: on bogroll packaging, in air freshener ads, in speeches by politicians who manage to dress up their assaults on freedom as new freedoms. Freedom is paid lip service while simultaneously being stabbed in the back - a mixed metaphor, I know, but then this is a mixed-up state of affairs.
Now, a fightback against our illiberal rulers has been launched from a most curious corner. Brick Lane, a long road in the East End of London, is the heart of the capital's Bangladeshi community. On a balmy afternoon, waiters in crisp white shirts and black waistcoats stand outside the lane's myriad curry shops, trying to coax passers-by to pop in for a cheap and cheerful spicy late lunch. Tempting, but I head towards the Old Truman Brewery, a former beer-making factory turned `creative industries' Mecca. It's an 11-acre site that houses more than 200 small, creative businesses. Fashion designers, artists and djs rub shoulders with architects, photographers and illustrators. The courtyard is packed with Nathan Barley lookalikes: young (well, youngish) men and women wearing casualwear and black-rimmed spectacles and tucking into exotic-looking sandwiches and cups of steaming coffee.
Tucked away on the first floor of the old brewery is S2S Productions, the makers of one of this year's most talked-about British movies: Taking Liberties. The two-hour campaigning documentary on how Blair's government signed away our civil liberties - from the right to protest to freedom of speech to the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty - was a surprise hit last month, both critically and in terms of box-office stubs. There's also a book of the same name and the film will come out on DVD later this year (complete with two hours of extra, New Labour-baiting material). The film's director, Chris Atkins, is sitting at his desk. `Hold on a minute', he says. `I'm just sending an email to some bastard who's threatening to sue me.' I notice that, taped to his wall, there is a rifle and a pair of handcuffs, which makes me think for a minute that he is really serious about taking down our killjoy government. Alas - and please pay attention, any police officers who happen to be reading this - they're only toys. (That's right, American readers, we Brits do not have the right to bear real arms. How would we ever manage to overthrow a tyrannical regime without guns, I hear you ask? Good question. Sometimes I lay awake at night wondering the very same.)
`The loss of liberty under New Labour has been unprecedented in modern times', says Atkins, over a bowl of chips and a glass of orange juice and lemonade in a gastro-pub back in the Nathan Barley courtyard. `Labour flushed down the toilet freedoms that have existed for a very long time', he says (making me think of that `Freedom' toilet paper again).
Both the film and the book versions of Taking Liberties trace the reams of illiberal laws that were enacted by the Blair regime. You think you have free speech and the right to protest? Not any more you don't, thanks to the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act that passed through parliament in April 2005 and which criminalised protest without permission. The Act made the square kilometre around Parliament Square in London a `designated area' (`more like a fucking "exclusion zone"', says Atkins) in which authorisation for any kind of protest must be sought six days in advance.
The exclusion zone, designed to protect the Houses of Parliament from the sight and sound of uppity protesters, spreads from Westminster to Lambeth, and covers the whole of Whitehall (which is peppered with government buildings), County Hall and much of the south bank of the Thames. Anyone who conducts an unauthorised protest inside the exclusion zone risks being imprisoned for up to 51 weeks. That's nearly a year. For protesting. As Atkins says, the authorities have `excluded political protest from the most political bit of London'. The fencing off of the political centre from last-minute, quickfire, angry demonstrations represents a serious denigration of our right to assemble and speak freely.
You think you could never be detained without trial? Think again. The Prevention of Terrorism Act was updated at the end of 2005 to allow suspects to be held without charge or trial for 28 days. Yesterday our new PM Gordon Brown put to parliament the case for extending the detention-without-trial option to 56 days. (This should have been taken as hard evidence that Brown is as allergic to liberty as his predecessor was. Instead, much of the media, where for some mysterious reason there has been an outbreak of Brown-nosing, congratulated the PM for rejecting `the melodramatic rhetoric of the last prime minister' in favour of articulating `the delicate balance between security and liberty' (1). So apparently it's okay to bin our liberties, so long as you do it in measured tones rather than with fiery bombast.) As Atkins points out, Habeas Corpus, the idea that `all detention is unlawful unless it has been approved by a court', has existed since the Magna Carta of 1215. `And then Blair comes along and scribbles it out', he says. The late comedian Tony Hancock put it well: `Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?' (2)
Atkins' book and film also attack the government's constant monitoring of the population, through CCTV cameras, numerous databases and soon (perhaps) ID cards. The book has a cutting chapter on how the Blairites' `Respect Agenda' has been used to force through new rules and regulations governing our behaviour. Consider Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which can be used to punish and correct behaviour that is not even illegal but which someone somewhere finds annoying. Describing ASBOs as a product of New Labour's politics of `Go And Stand In The Naughty Corner', Atkins writes in the book version of Taking Liberties: `Even though New Labour has been responsible for thousands of new criminal offences, you still have to be found guilty of one of these to go to prison. ASBOs neatly get around this little niggle, by having tailor-made restrictions for each individual person.. If you are doing something that isn't against the law, but someone else doesn't like, they can go to a magistrates' court and get one of these orders that bans you acting in that way. If you break the ASBO, you go to jail.' (3)
In very plain English: you can now be imprisoned for doing something that is not against the law. This can include wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a shopping mall or making a lot of noise while you wash your dishes or gathering on street corners in groups of two or more or.hold on, this list could go on forever. To save time, yours and mine, let me state the bald truth: the ASBOs set-up means you can effectively and potentially be imprisoned for just about anything. Where's Magna Carta when we need her most?
Atkins is clearly passionate about civil liberties. He talks animatedly, in between wolfing down mouthfuls of a steak-and-salad sandwich, about how important the rights to protest and free speech are. It makes a refreshing change from listening to those sometimes dull civil libertarians who clog up the airwaves and who can't seem to get through a single sentence without bigging up Brussels as the true defender of our rights. (This is the same Brussels that scolds entire nations for voting the `wrong way' in EU referendums.) And yet. there's something peculiar about Atkins' defence of liberty, which I couldn't put my finger on at first. Then, as he tried to convince me that most Sun and Daily Mail readers do not appreciate how British and traditional liberty is, or that their hero - Winston Churchill - was apparently a great defender of liberty, it suddenly strikes me: the Taking Liberties project is actually conservative rather than radical. It uses the `politics of fear' as much as the Blairities did, and it seems to view freedom as a tradition that we must respect rather than as a thing that we do in our daily lives.
One of the most striking things about the film version of Taking Liberties is what it leaves out. It's good on the degradation of our formal rights, but it has little to say about the creeping erosion of our informal freedoms. It's good on the way in which the relationship between the state and the individual was redefined by the Blairites (with the state coming out very much on top), but it is silent on the Blairites' interference in our relationships with each other. For instance, it says nothing about the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, a shockingly Stalinist piece of legislation which will codify the requirement for every adult who works with children to undergo a criminal records check. Built on a deep suspicion of the adult population, enforced vetting will require that 9.5million adults - from youth workers to lollipop ladies, football coaches to priests - submit themselves to the watchful eye of the suspicious state. This can only poison intergenerational trust and undermine free and easy relations between men, women and children.
Nor does Taking Liberties address New Labour's smoking bans, which take away our choice even in that traditional getaway from stuffiness, the public house. Or its ban on junk-food advertising, which usurps parental decision-making on the basis that Government Knows Best what children should eat. Or its use of the health agenda to enforce a New Conformism amongst the public, where we're advised what to eat, how much exercise to take, what to wear while having sex (condoms, please), and how to raise our children as healthy and respectful citizens in the mould of our Dear Leaders (first Blair, now Brown).
Taking Liberties seems able to conceive of freedom only in the public sphere of courts and demonstrations; it has a blind spot about freedom and choice in the private sphere. Yet libertarians, alongside defending public space from the encroachments of heavyhanded legislation, must also defend private spaces as areas where we should be free to kick back, relax, experiment and make and break our own rules. A man needs an unfettered private space in which to mould relationships and develop his personality, as well as deserving respect, equality and freedom of speech when he enters the public sphere.
At times, Taking Liberties uses a very Blairite brand of fearmongering in an attempt to wake the apparently fickle public to the dangers of New Labour's illiberalism. The film hints that we could slide back to Nazism if we don't resist New Labour's illiberal agenda, while the book berates its readers by asking if they will simply `chuckle at the jokes, feel sorry for the people whose lives have been ruined, and then go back to watching "Celebrity Face Swap"' (4). Both the film and the book seem to be saying: `Don't you know there is a long tradition of freedom in Britain? Aren't you going to help defend this tradition?' The redefinition of freedom as a stuffy tradition risks devaluing liberty, while also placing people in a subordinate relation to their own freedom. Apparently our role is merely to respect the freedoms that have been graciously handed down to us by heroes of the past (Winston Churchill!), rather than to live and breathe our freedoms every day, to act them out, to call for their expansion and improvement. People should not be seen as the passive and grateful recipients of rights from on high; they should be seen as freedom personified, as freedom itself.
Atkins says we need a `written bill of rights' in order to protect freedom from power-hungry politicians. It comes across like a demand to elevate freedom above the messy business of life, love and politics. In the past, constitutions and bills of rights tended to be written in revolutionary moments by the representatives of mass movements, and thus they expressed a genuine desire on the part of large swathes of people to live differently and more freely. By contrast, a bill of rights that was based on a fear of out-of-control politicians and a suspicion of the celebrity-obsessed public would run the risk of turning freedom into stone, ossifying it, making it a museum piece that can be admired by lawyers and professional civil libertarians but which remains beyond the reach of the smoking, drinking, junk food-eating man in the street.
Atkins has done a good job of exposing to public ridicule New Labour's assault on formal rights (and I can't help noting the irony that his civil libertarian cell emerged from the heart of the `creative industries' that were so flattered by the Blairites). But we have much further to go if we are to turn freedom from rhetoric into a reality.
Source
British tyranny again -- in education
Plans to force teenagers to stay in education or training until they are 18 could cause mass truancy and criminalise thousands of young people, a teachers’ leader claimed yesterday. Raising the education leaving age from 16 to 18 would simply “prolong the agony” of school for many disaffected pupils, Geraldine Everett, chairman of the Professional Association of Teachers, said.
Speaking at the PAT annual conference in Harrogate, Ms Everett said that the issue was a “potential minefield” if not handled sensitively and that teenagers should be given some choice over whether they worked, stayed on at school or in training. “Here is a Government that has toyed with the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 in order to promote a greater sense of citizenship among our young people. Yet it proposes to extend compulsory education or training to 18, to compel the already disaffected to, in their perception, prolong the agony,” she said.
Last year Alan Johnson, the former Education Secretary, who left school at 16, said it was unacceptable to see a 16-year-old working and not receiving any training or schooling. He said that the number of 17-year-olds receiving some sort of education or training should be raised from the current 75 per cent to 90 per cent by 2015.
But Ms Everett gave warning that children for whom the system had already failed were unlikely to want to be alienated further by compulsory 16-18 education or business-led training, which is designed for purely economic reasons to fill a skills gap. “To make them conscripts is likely to reinforce failure, leading to even greater disaffection,” she said. “Enforcement could lead to mass truancy, further disruption to other learners and staff, maybe even needless criminalisation if enforcement measures are imposed.” To make sure teenagers turn up at school, college or their work placements, the Government proposes to threaten them with possible court action and 50 pound fines. Ms Everett added that providing opportunities for this age group should perhaps be compulsory, but pleaded with the Government not to turn schools into “mere exam factories”.
Gordon Brown wants to change the law to require all teenagers to stay on in education or training until their 18th birthday from 2013 in an attempt to cut the number of young people who drop out of school and struggle to find jobs. More than 200,000 under17s are estimated to be out of education, employment and training. Ms Everett suggested that more money should be spent on early years education, which would prevent the need for catchup later on. Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said: “It is only right that we are looking at all options to keep young people engaged in education or training up until 18, whether at school, training or in a job. Those young people who continue in education or training for longer earn more, and are less likely to be involved in antisocial behaviour.”
Source
Incredible British bungling: "Known sex offenders are living unchecked in the community because there are too many of them to be monitored regularly, according to research commissioned by the Home Office. The rapidly growing number of people registered as violent criminals or sex attackers is threatening to overwhelm the police, probation officers and social workers who have to keep them under supervision"
Children with cancer are less likely to survive in Britain than in other European countries, two specialists have claimed. The reason could be slower detection of the cancers or less aggressive treatment once they are diagnosed, according to Alan Craft, of the Institute of Child Health at Newcastle University, and Kathy Pritchard-Jones, of the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, southwest London.
Writing in The Lancet Oncology, Professor Craft and Professor Pritchard-Jones say that, despite a National Service Framework for Children that sets standards for care, there are no targets and children "continue to be a low priority for the NHS".
They highlight trials carried out on Wilms's tumour - a childhood condition - in Germany, which showed that, between 1994 and 2001, 27.4 per cent of patients had a cancer that was first identified during a visit to a health professional for an unrelated problem, or by routine surveillance.
By comparison, in Britain, only 11 per cent of patients treated at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London, and 4 per cent of those referred to Newcastle General Hospital or the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, were identified in this way. This suggests that GPs, and possibly some specialists, are slow to detect the cancers, thereby delaying treatment. In Germany, early diagnosis by routine or incidental examination is linked to increased survival, they say.
Routine health surveillance systems and opportunities for diagnosis for children may also be worse in Britain. In Germany most children have a primary-care paediatrician who provides regular check-ups, whereas in Britain the guidelines are not as thorough, the authors say. They conclude: "Sub-optimum survival for childhood cancer is just one example of the worse state of children's healthcare in the UK compared with many other countries. "The perinatal mortality rate puts the UK in fifteenth position in Europe and there is clear evidence that children with diabetes are [also] not receiving optimum care."
However, Professor Alex Markham, a former chief executive of Cancer Research UK and now its senior medical adviser, said that overall survival rates from childhood cancer in Britain had reached 77 per cent, and for some types of the disease survival was more than 90 per cent. "The data discussed in this comment in Lancet Oncology were collected between 1977 and 1997. Some of these apparent survival differences might be down to variations in the way data are collected in different countries," he said.
Roisin Trehy, senior nurse with Cancerbackup, said: "Any evidence to suggest that children are not a health priority is hugely concerning. However, this research does not seem to take account of the fact that, until the end of the trial period in 1997, the UK did not have a multidisciplinary team approach to cancer care."
Source
Britain's "New Labour" flushed liberty down the toilet
Chris Atkins, director of Taking Liberties, talks about freedom, fear and how the government is making us all `stand in the naughty corner'
Freedom has become a dirty word. So dirty, in fact, that there is now a brand of toilet paper called `Freedom'. Seriously. You can buy it at Tesco. It's light blue, perfumed and it has the word `Freedom' emblazoned across its packaging. What's that all about? Freedom from skidmarks? `Man's butt cheeks are born clean, but everywhere they are being stained!' You can now literally wipe your arse with `Freedom'.
When the f-word is not being used to advertise all manner of toilet products (you can also enjoy `Freedom Tampons' or liberate the whiffy bits of your home with an air freshener called `Freedom in Fragrance'), it is being bastardised to mean its precise opposite. The war on terror promises us `freedom from fear'. This actually means sacrificing free speech, free movement and universal legal principles such as Habeas Corpus, in the name of countering the threat posed by a conspiracy of dunces: that ragbag collection of overgrown, woe-is-us Islamist-adultescents who occasionally throw terror tantrums (or at least they would, if they knew how to wire a car bomb properly).
The authorities recently granted us `smokefreedom'. Graciously, and with all the tender loving care of a kindly big brother, the New Labour government made our lives `smokefree' by banning the lighting-up of cigarettes in any building or space or bus-stop or black taxi or even home that can reasonably be described as a `place of work'. (And yes, it's the lighting up that is the crime. Like Bill Clinton, you don't have to have inhaled in order to be shopped to the cops by members of the public, who are being encouraged by state propaganda to squeal on smokers by calling the `smokefree hotline'.) `Smokefree' takes Newspeak to a new level: the intrusion of the government into every corner of every pub, club and restaurant in the land - more than that, its intrusion into the decisions we make about what to ingest into our bodies - is celebrated as a new liberty, as `smokefreedom': the Right Not to Cough.
We live in an era of Doublespeak. In Britain, `freedom' is proclaimed from the rooftops, while our real freedoms to protest, speak openly and choose how we wish to live our lives are going up in smoke. Everywhere you look, the f-word is celebrated: on bogroll packaging, in air freshener ads, in speeches by politicians who manage to dress up their assaults on freedom as new freedoms. Freedom is paid lip service while simultaneously being stabbed in the back - a mixed metaphor, I know, but then this is a mixed-up state of affairs.
Now, a fightback against our illiberal rulers has been launched from a most curious corner. Brick Lane, a long road in the East End of London, is the heart of the capital's Bangladeshi community. On a balmy afternoon, waiters in crisp white shirts and black waistcoats stand outside the lane's myriad curry shops, trying to coax passers-by to pop in for a cheap and cheerful spicy late lunch. Tempting, but I head towards the Old Truman Brewery, a former beer-making factory turned `creative industries' Mecca. It's an 11-acre site that houses more than 200 small, creative businesses. Fashion designers, artists and djs rub shoulders with architects, photographers and illustrators. The courtyard is packed with Nathan Barley lookalikes: young (well, youngish) men and women wearing casualwear and black-rimmed spectacles and tucking into exotic-looking sandwiches and cups of steaming coffee.
Tucked away on the first floor of the old brewery is S2S Productions, the makers of one of this year's most talked-about British movies: Taking Liberties. The two-hour campaigning documentary on how Blair's government signed away our civil liberties - from the right to protest to freedom of speech to the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty - was a surprise hit last month, both critically and in terms of box-office stubs. There's also a book of the same name and the film will come out on DVD later this year (complete with two hours of extra, New Labour-baiting material). The film's director, Chris Atkins, is sitting at his desk. `Hold on a minute', he says. `I'm just sending an email to some bastard who's threatening to sue me.' I notice that, taped to his wall, there is a rifle and a pair of handcuffs, which makes me think for a minute that he is really serious about taking down our killjoy government. Alas - and please pay attention, any police officers who happen to be reading this - they're only toys. (That's right, American readers, we Brits do not have the right to bear real arms. How would we ever manage to overthrow a tyrannical regime without guns, I hear you ask? Good question. Sometimes I lay awake at night wondering the very same.)
`The loss of liberty under New Labour has been unprecedented in modern times', says Atkins, over a bowl of chips and a glass of orange juice and lemonade in a gastro-pub back in the Nathan Barley courtyard. `Labour flushed down the toilet freedoms that have existed for a very long time', he says (making me think of that `Freedom' toilet paper again).
Both the film and the book versions of Taking Liberties trace the reams of illiberal laws that were enacted by the Blair regime. You think you have free speech and the right to protest? Not any more you don't, thanks to the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act that passed through parliament in April 2005 and which criminalised protest without permission. The Act made the square kilometre around Parliament Square in London a `designated area' (`more like a fucking "exclusion zone"', says Atkins) in which authorisation for any kind of protest must be sought six days in advance.
The exclusion zone, designed to protect the Houses of Parliament from the sight and sound of uppity protesters, spreads from Westminster to Lambeth, and covers the whole of Whitehall (which is peppered with government buildings), County Hall and much of the south bank of the Thames. Anyone who conducts an unauthorised protest inside the exclusion zone risks being imprisoned for up to 51 weeks. That's nearly a year. For protesting. As Atkins says, the authorities have `excluded political protest from the most political bit of London'. The fencing off of the political centre from last-minute, quickfire, angry demonstrations represents a serious denigration of our right to assemble and speak freely.
You think you could never be detained without trial? Think again. The Prevention of Terrorism Act was updated at the end of 2005 to allow suspects to be held without charge or trial for 28 days. Yesterday our new PM Gordon Brown put to parliament the case for extending the detention-without-trial option to 56 days. (This should have been taken as hard evidence that Brown is as allergic to liberty as his predecessor was. Instead, much of the media, where for some mysterious reason there has been an outbreak of Brown-nosing, congratulated the PM for rejecting `the melodramatic rhetoric of the last prime minister' in favour of articulating `the delicate balance between security and liberty' (1). So apparently it's okay to bin our liberties, so long as you do it in measured tones rather than with fiery bombast.) As Atkins points out, Habeas Corpus, the idea that `all detention is unlawful unless it has been approved by a court', has existed since the Magna Carta of 1215. `And then Blair comes along and scribbles it out', he says. The late comedian Tony Hancock put it well: `Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?' (2)
Atkins' book and film also attack the government's constant monitoring of the population, through CCTV cameras, numerous databases and soon (perhaps) ID cards. The book has a cutting chapter on how the Blairites' `Respect Agenda' has been used to force through new rules and regulations governing our behaviour. Consider Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which can be used to punish and correct behaviour that is not even illegal but which someone somewhere finds annoying. Describing ASBOs as a product of New Labour's politics of `Go And Stand In The Naughty Corner', Atkins writes in the book version of Taking Liberties: `Even though New Labour has been responsible for thousands of new criminal offences, you still have to be found guilty of one of these to go to prison. ASBOs neatly get around this little niggle, by having tailor-made restrictions for each individual person.. If you are doing something that isn't against the law, but someone else doesn't like, they can go to a magistrates' court and get one of these orders that bans you acting in that way. If you break the ASBO, you go to jail.' (3)
In very plain English: you can now be imprisoned for doing something that is not against the law. This can include wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a shopping mall or making a lot of noise while you wash your dishes or gathering on street corners in groups of two or more or.hold on, this list could go on forever. To save time, yours and mine, let me state the bald truth: the ASBOs set-up means you can effectively and potentially be imprisoned for just about anything. Where's Magna Carta when we need her most?
Atkins is clearly passionate about civil liberties. He talks animatedly, in between wolfing down mouthfuls of a steak-and-salad sandwich, about how important the rights to protest and free speech are. It makes a refreshing change from listening to those sometimes dull civil libertarians who clog up the airwaves and who can't seem to get through a single sentence without bigging up Brussels as the true defender of our rights. (This is the same Brussels that scolds entire nations for voting the `wrong way' in EU referendums.) And yet. there's something peculiar about Atkins' defence of liberty, which I couldn't put my finger on at first. Then, as he tried to convince me that most Sun and Daily Mail readers do not appreciate how British and traditional liberty is, or that their hero - Winston Churchill - was apparently a great defender of liberty, it suddenly strikes me: the Taking Liberties project is actually conservative rather than radical. It uses the `politics of fear' as much as the Blairities did, and it seems to view freedom as a tradition that we must respect rather than as a thing that we do in our daily lives.
One of the most striking things about the film version of Taking Liberties is what it leaves out. It's good on the degradation of our formal rights, but it has little to say about the creeping erosion of our informal freedoms. It's good on the way in which the relationship between the state and the individual was redefined by the Blairites (with the state coming out very much on top), but it is silent on the Blairites' interference in our relationships with each other. For instance, it says nothing about the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, a shockingly Stalinist piece of legislation which will codify the requirement for every adult who works with children to undergo a criminal records check. Built on a deep suspicion of the adult population, enforced vetting will require that 9.5million adults - from youth workers to lollipop ladies, football coaches to priests - submit themselves to the watchful eye of the suspicious state. This can only poison intergenerational trust and undermine free and easy relations between men, women and children.
Nor does Taking Liberties address New Labour's smoking bans, which take away our choice even in that traditional getaway from stuffiness, the public house. Or its ban on junk-food advertising, which usurps parental decision-making on the basis that Government Knows Best what children should eat. Or its use of the health agenda to enforce a New Conformism amongst the public, where we're advised what to eat, how much exercise to take, what to wear while having sex (condoms, please), and how to raise our children as healthy and respectful citizens in the mould of our Dear Leaders (first Blair, now Brown).
Taking Liberties seems able to conceive of freedom only in the public sphere of courts and demonstrations; it has a blind spot about freedom and choice in the private sphere. Yet libertarians, alongside defending public space from the encroachments of heavyhanded legislation, must also defend private spaces as areas where we should be free to kick back, relax, experiment and make and break our own rules. A man needs an unfettered private space in which to mould relationships and develop his personality, as well as deserving respect, equality and freedom of speech when he enters the public sphere.
At times, Taking Liberties uses a very Blairite brand of fearmongering in an attempt to wake the apparently fickle public to the dangers of New Labour's illiberalism. The film hints that we could slide back to Nazism if we don't resist New Labour's illiberal agenda, while the book berates its readers by asking if they will simply `chuckle at the jokes, feel sorry for the people whose lives have been ruined, and then go back to watching "Celebrity Face Swap"' (4). Both the film and the book seem to be saying: `Don't you know there is a long tradition of freedom in Britain? Aren't you going to help defend this tradition?' The redefinition of freedom as a stuffy tradition risks devaluing liberty, while also placing people in a subordinate relation to their own freedom. Apparently our role is merely to respect the freedoms that have been graciously handed down to us by heroes of the past (Winston Churchill!), rather than to live and breathe our freedoms every day, to act them out, to call for their expansion and improvement. People should not be seen as the passive and grateful recipients of rights from on high; they should be seen as freedom personified, as freedom itself.
Atkins says we need a `written bill of rights' in order to protect freedom from power-hungry politicians. It comes across like a demand to elevate freedom above the messy business of life, love and politics. In the past, constitutions and bills of rights tended to be written in revolutionary moments by the representatives of mass movements, and thus they expressed a genuine desire on the part of large swathes of people to live differently and more freely. By contrast, a bill of rights that was based on a fear of out-of-control politicians and a suspicion of the celebrity-obsessed public would run the risk of turning freedom into stone, ossifying it, making it a museum piece that can be admired by lawyers and professional civil libertarians but which remains beyond the reach of the smoking, drinking, junk food-eating man in the street.
Atkins has done a good job of exposing to public ridicule New Labour's assault on formal rights (and I can't help noting the irony that his civil libertarian cell emerged from the heart of the `creative industries' that were so flattered by the Blairites). But we have much further to go if we are to turn freedom from rhetoric into a reality.
Source
British tyranny again -- in education
Plans to force teenagers to stay in education or training until they are 18 could cause mass truancy and criminalise thousands of young people, a teachers’ leader claimed yesterday. Raising the education leaving age from 16 to 18 would simply “prolong the agony” of school for many disaffected pupils, Geraldine Everett, chairman of the Professional Association of Teachers, said.
Speaking at the PAT annual conference in Harrogate, Ms Everett said that the issue was a “potential minefield” if not handled sensitively and that teenagers should be given some choice over whether they worked, stayed on at school or in training. “Here is a Government that has toyed with the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 in order to promote a greater sense of citizenship among our young people. Yet it proposes to extend compulsory education or training to 18, to compel the already disaffected to, in their perception, prolong the agony,” she said.
Last year Alan Johnson, the former Education Secretary, who left school at 16, said it was unacceptable to see a 16-year-old working and not receiving any training or schooling. He said that the number of 17-year-olds receiving some sort of education or training should be raised from the current 75 per cent to 90 per cent by 2015.
But Ms Everett gave warning that children for whom the system had already failed were unlikely to want to be alienated further by compulsory 16-18 education or business-led training, which is designed for purely economic reasons to fill a skills gap. “To make them conscripts is likely to reinforce failure, leading to even greater disaffection,” she said. “Enforcement could lead to mass truancy, further disruption to other learners and staff, maybe even needless criminalisation if enforcement measures are imposed.” To make sure teenagers turn up at school, college or their work placements, the Government proposes to threaten them with possible court action and 50 pound fines. Ms Everett added that providing opportunities for this age group should perhaps be compulsory, but pleaded with the Government not to turn schools into “mere exam factories”.
Gordon Brown wants to change the law to require all teenagers to stay on in education or training until their 18th birthday from 2013 in an attempt to cut the number of young people who drop out of school and struggle to find jobs. More than 200,000 under17s are estimated to be out of education, employment and training. Ms Everett suggested that more money should be spent on early years education, which would prevent the need for catchup later on. Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said: “It is only right that we are looking at all options to keep young people engaged in education or training up until 18, whether at school, training or in a job. Those young people who continue in education or training for longer earn more, and are less likely to be involved in antisocial behaviour.”
Source
Incredible British bungling: "Known sex offenders are living unchecked in the community because there are too many of them to be monitored regularly, according to research commissioned by the Home Office. The rapidly growing number of people registered as violent criminals or sex attackers is threatening to overwhelm the police, probation officers and social workers who have to keep them under supervision"
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
For those who don't know much history, Israel is above being compared with Czechoslovakia before WWII. Thanks in part to the appeasement policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Czechoslovakia was eventually overrun by Hitler
The England Cricket Team
Just for a once-in-the blue-moon change, I would like to mention something amusing that refers to general correctness of usage rather than politically correct usage. It does refer to the world's most popular bat-and-ball game so perhaps it might even be worth knowing some day.
When the English cricket authorities send out a team to play matches (called "tests") in Australia, the team they send out is referred to as "the England cricket team". This puzzles some. They think it should be the English cricket team.
It is not really puzzling, however. There are many cricket teams in England and they are all English cricket teams but there is only one England cricket team -- comprised of the best players England can find -- and some of the players in it may in fact be Indians (etc.) rather than Englishmen.
So that is logical enough and one might conclude from it that a team representing Australia would be referred to as the "Australia cricket team". But it isn't. If you referred to the team in that way you would be thought to be either a foreigner or a bit of a nit. The team representing Australia is almost always referred to as "Australia" or "the Australians". "The Australian cricket team" is sometimes heard but it is rare.
Tricky, isn't it? Don't ask me why, though.
DEEP GREEN STILL NOT GREEN ENOUGH IN BRITAIN
Once again we see that there's no such thing as a happy Greenie
In an age obsessed with environmental sustainability, Tony Wrench and his partner Jane Faith would appear to be beyond reproach. Their eco-home was made with local materials, its electricity supplied by solar and wind power and its heat kept in by a turf roof and straw insulation. They compost their sewage using a reed bed and make do without a fridge or washing machine. But the couple have been told to demolish their beloved home - because it isn't green enough.
The single-room roundhouse, based on a Celtic layout, is set in a protected part of the Pembrokeshire coast and has been refused planning permission because it "failed to make a positive environmental impact". The couple, who grow their own food and make a modest living from music and woodcraft, feel they are being victimised despite doing more than most to reduce their carbon footprint. The Hobbit House, as locals in Brithdir Mawr, near Newport, have dubbed it, is destined for demolition unless given a last-minute reprieve by the Welsh Assembly.
"You get the feeling that it does not matter what you do, they will always say `no'," Mr Wrench said. "We are doing everything we possibly can to reduce our carbon footprint. It is about as low as we can get and it demonstrates that an environmentally sustainable lifestyle is possible." He added: "This house is so beautiful to be in, and the garden so fruitful and bursting with life of all kinds, that I still cannot believe that in a world of such environmental spoilation and with spreading patches of such ugliness, there are still people paid to work on having this home demolished. What low impact proposal will ever withstand this level of nit-picking?" said Mr Wrench, a wood turner.
The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority ruled that the dwelling would have a negative impact on dormice, bats and invertebrates. An ecologist's report concluded that if permission were granted, the home would cause, "severe degradation of the National Park landscape".
Mr Wrench, 61, plans to appeal against the decision, the latest step in a ten-year legal battle. He spent 3,000 pounds building the home a decade ago using local materials and insulating it with straw. A study confirmed that their carbon footprint was just a fraction of the national average, but the park authority says that is still not good enough.
Ifor Jones, the authority's head of conservation, admitted that the rules were strict, but said that they applied to everyone. He said: "Yes, we do have high hurdles, but it is important that any development enhances the environment, rather than detracts from it. In this instance the location of the roundhouse and vegetable garden within an area of semi-natural vegetation, comprising woodland edge and unimproved wet grassland, is considered to have had negative impacts."
Source
Environmentalist population growing out of control
Another lofty lecture for us peasants reported below. Post lifted from Bishop Hill. See the original for links
A couple of weeks ago a body calling itself the Optimum Population Trust called for families in the UK to limit themselves to a single child. The Times had this to say:
Britain's birthrate, growing at its fastest for nearly 30 years - at 1.87 children per couple - is, says the author of its report, Professor John Guillebaud, an environmental liability. "Each new UK birth, through the inevitable resource consumption and pollution that UK affluence generates, is responsible for about 160 times as much climate-related environmental damage as a new birth in Ethiopia."
Professor Guillebaud has three children. As does Sir Crispin Tickell, a patron of the Trust. The majority of the other patrons, and Prof Guillebaud's co-chair, Val Stevens, have two children each.
Hurricanes: Another Royal Society beatup
They should be renamed the Propaganda Society. There's been a real desperation to link hurricanes with global warming but the facts have been pesky. But they keep trying
A study has found about twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago, largely as a result of greenhouse warming. It also notes the proportion of major hurricanes to less intense systems has increased significantly. The study concludes that warmer seas and altered wind patterns are increasing the number of tropical systems. That differs from previous studies, which assert global warming is boosting the strength of hurricanes, but not necessarily the frequency. "Even a quiet year by today's standards would be considered normal or slightly active compared to the average year in the early part of the 20th century," said co-author Greg Holland, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
The study was due to be published online late yesterday by the Royal Society of London, Britain's leading academy of science. Based on a statistical analysis, it shows that from 1900 to 1930 an average of six tropical systems formed in the Atlantic, including four hurricanes and two tropical storms. From 1930 to 1940, that increased to an average of 10 systems a year, including five hurricanes and five tropical storms. And from 1995 to 2005, that climbed to 15 systems, including eight hurricanes and seven tropical storms. Those increases correlate with sea surface temperatures, which have risen about 1.3C in the past 100 years, the study says.
Not everyone agrees with its findings. Many scientists say a natural cycle of warm waters in the Atlantic accounts for the surge in hurricanes since 1995. One argument against global warming fuelling more hurricanes is that prior to 1970, many storms were undetected, meaning the level of tropical activity could have been just as intense in previous decades. That is because 1970 was the first year satellites were used to monitor the globe. Even more hurricanes were probably missed prior to 1944, when hurricane-hunter aircraft were first dispatched to investigate storms.
But Dr Holland and co-author Peter Webster, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, dispute that incomplete data records alone explain the sharp increase in tropical activity during the three time periods they studied since 1900. They say tropical storm activity has increased by about 50 per cent from period to period, which they claim negates the natural cycle theory. "These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes," Dr Holland said.
Source
Shortsighted British attitude to IVF
If a country wants to keep its population up, it should promote IVF
INFERTILITY is normally seen as a private matter. If a couple are infertile and wish they were not, that is sad. But there is understandable resistance in many countries to the idea that treatments intended to deal with this sadness--known collectively as assisted reproductive technologies, or ARTs--should be paid for out of public funds. Such funds are scarce, and infertility is not a life-threatening condition.
However, two papers presented to the "State of the ART" conference held earlier this month in Lyon argue that in Europe, at least, there may be a public interest in promoting ARTs after all. The low fertility rate in many of that continent's more developed countries means their populations are ageing and shrinking. If governments want to change this, ARTs--most significantly in-vitro fertilisation (IVF)--could offer at least part of a way to do so.
As the conference heard, IVF does seem to be keeping up the numbers in at least one country. Tina Jensen of the University of Southern Denmark has just finished a study of more than 700,000 Danish women. She found that young women in Denmark have a significantly lower natural conception rate than in past decades. That is partly, but not entirely, because they are having their children later in life. The rest of the cause is unknown, though reduced sperm quality in men may be a factor.
Whatever the cause, she also found that the effect has been almost completely compensated for by an increasing use of ARTs. Denmark's native population is more or less stable, but some 3.9% of babies born there in 2003 (the most recent year for which figures are available) were the result of IVF. The comparable figure for another northern European country, Britain, was 1.5%. Without IVF, then, the number of Danes would be shrinking fast.
That it is not may have something to do with the fact that in Denmark the taxpayer will cover up to six cycles of IVF treatment. In Britain, by contrast, couples are supposed to be entitled to three cycles. In practice, many of the local trusts that dish the money out do not pay for any cycles at all.
Jonathan Grant, the head of the Cambridge branch of the Rand Corporation (an American think-tank), believes this is shortsighted. His paper showed that if Britain supported IVF at the Danish level then its birth rate would probably increase by about 10,000 a year. The cost of offering six cycles to couples (and doing so in practice, rather than just in theory) would be an extra GBP250m-430m ($500m-860m) a year. That is not trivial, but Dr Grant reckons it is cheaper than other ways of boosting the birth rate.
Some countries, for example, have tried to bribe women into having more children by increasing child benefits. According to his calculations, raising such benefits costs between GBP50,000 and GBP100,000 a year for each additional birth procured. Ten thousand extra births each year would thus cost between GBP500m and GBP1 billion. There are, of course, some disadvantages to promoting IVF. In particular, women who use it tend to be older than those who conceive naturally, and that can lead to congenital problems in their children. But if the countries of Europe do wish to keep their populations up, making IVF more widely available might be a good way of doing so.
Source
NHS tells woman of 108 told to wait 18 months for hearing aid
A woman aged 108 has been told she must wait 18 months before the Health Service will give her the hearing aid she needs. Former piano teacher Olive Beal, one of the oldest people in Britain, has poor eyesight and uses a wheelchair. The delay could mean she will be unable to communicate and listen to the music she loves.
Now her family have said that realistically Mrs Beal is unlikely ever to receive the digital hearing aid that will save her from isolation. The one-time suffragette is one of hundreds of thousands of older people made to wait up to two years and sometimes more for modern digital hearing aids that make a dramatic difference to their ability to hear and communicate.
The case of Mrs Beal comes just a few days after the Mail revealed how another centenarian, Esme Collins, has been threatened with eviction from the nursing home where she has lived for ten years in a dispute between home owners and the local council over her fees. The Daily Mail's Dignity for the Elderly campaign has highlighted the way the elderly are made to pay high bills while their needs and interests are sidelined in the system meant to care for them.
Mrs Beal, who lives in a care home in Deal in Kent, has used an old-fashioned analogue hearing aid for the last five years. She has now been assessed as needing a more modern digital hearing aid which cuts out background noise and makes it easier to hear conversation or music. These cost around 1,000 pounds on the private market. But Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust have told her family she must wait 18 months before she gets one on the NHS. By then Mrs Beal will be aged 110. She said yesterday: 'I could be dead by then.'
Her grand- daughter Maria Scott, 52, said: 'I spoke to her doctor some time ago about getting her a new hearing aid, as the existing one did not seem to be working for her. 'After a hearing test they said, "Yes, she does need a digital hearing aid, but there is an 18-month waiting list". 'I would have thought they would take her age into account as she probably has not got 18 months to wait. 'Olive worked hard from the age of 16 to her late 60s and paid taxes. She has been healthy all her life and lived with her daughter until 15 years ago - she has never sponged off the state. 'Her eyesight is falling, and if she cannot hear then she will be isolated from the outside world. 'Her analogue hearing aid does not filter out background noise so it makes it very difficult for her to hear clearly. But the digital one would allow her to hear people talking to her and to CDs. She loves music hall numbers.'
Mrs Beal went to school in London with Christabel Pankhurst, daughter of suffragette leader Emily, and helped at suffragette demonstrations. She brought up four children but only her eldest son, now in his eighties, survives. Her youngest son was a World War Two soldier killed in Normandy on the day after the D-Day landings. She was widowed 45 years ago.
Donna Tipping of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf said: 'I am afraid this is a common problem. 'In some parts of the country waiting times are more than two years, which is shocking. 'The new digital hearing aids can really transform people's lives. 'It is an issue of quality of life, with isolation, frustration and withdrawing from society caused by loss of hearing, and it is sad because this is reversible.'
A spokesman for Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust said: 'We are reducing waiting times. 'The priority is given to patients who do not have an existing hearing aid, but we accept our service needs improving. We apologise to any patient kept waiting for a new or replacement hearing aid.'
Source
New TB vaccine
One of the most feared diseases in the world is making an alarming comeback in the UK. Cases of tuberculosis increased by 10 per cent in 2005, with 8,494 cases, and are set to continue rising, as the bug becomes increasingly resistant to drugs, and international travel extends its global reach. TB kills about 1.6 million people a year, largely in developing countries, and experts believe that its global resurgence goes hand in hand with the Aids pandemic. However, Helen McShane, a British scientist, announced today that a groundbreaking new vaccine - the first in 80 years, which has taken ten years to develop - is being tested in human clinical trials for the first time.
The areas most affected by the disease in Britain are cities such as London, Birmingham and Leicester, with immigrant communities from areas where the disease is still common: Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of Africa. One in five cases of TB is found in new arrivals into the country. However, the disease is not something you could simply catch on a train; only frequent or prolonged contact with someone with TB puts a person at risk (hence why it's passed within families), and it can be treated with antibiotics if diagnosed quickly. Nevertheless, the Government is so concerned at the growing number of people with TB that it is considering screening visitors to the UK from countries such as China and India, it was revealed this week.
If the new TB vaccine passes its trials, as it is expected to do, it could be available in your GP's practice by 2015, when it would work as a booster for the childhood BCG injection (now given only to children in high-risk groups), conferring long-lasting immunity on all adults and thus preventing the spread of this disease.
Symptoms include a persistent cough, weight loss and fever. Before the First World War there were more than 100,000 UK cases a year, but numbers have fallen steadily since the BCG vaccination was introduced in 1953.
Dr McShane, the scientist behind this latest booster vaccine, is a 40-year-old medical doctor-turned-vaccinologist. It's impossible not to share her excitement, particularly when she describes the day in her Oxford University laboratory when she realised she was on to something. "It was a little tense," says Dr McShane, who was then 35 and five years into a project that she had started as a PhD student in 1997. "I went into the lab to check blood tests taken the day before, looked at the plates and couldn't believe my eyes. The results were excellent. We knew the vaccine would stimulate the production of some antibodies but there were ten times the number we had predicted. I ran down the corridor to show my professor immediately." Dr McShane knew she had created a vaccine that could potentially save two million lives a year worldwide. The Wellcome Trust will today announce her project as the first new vaccine for TB in 80 years.
There are two main reasons why a new vaccine has taken so long to develop. The first is that it's a difficult bug to vaccinate against as it disguises itself efficiently in the body. There are different strains of the bug, but Dr McShane believes that they are similar enough for the vaccine to be effective against them all. The other reason for the delay, according to the charity TB Alert, is that there wasn't any funding. Until recently TB was prevalent only in the developing world and so drug companies were reluctant to plough money into a vaccine.
A potential vaccine is an achievement that Dr McShane would not have dared to imagine when she first joined Professor Adrian Hill at the Nuffield Department of Medicine in Oxford to begin a PhD. "Most students were working on a malaria project; no one was looking at a TB vaccine, so I thought it would be a good idea," she says. Dr McShane had first started to study the tuberculosis bacterium when, as a young doctor, she was working in an HIV clinic in London. The two diseases often present hand-in-hand because TB is an opportunistic infection and finds the weakened immune system of an HIV-infected person an easy way in. Dr McShane says she found it frustrating that she could offer the latest antiretrovirals for the HIV infection but she had nothing to prescribe except traditional antibiotics for the TB. She could see that as different strains of TB bacteria became resistant to these drugs, her armoury was looking more and more depleted. Surely something could be done?
She decided to take her curiosity into the laboratory. Most contagious diseases can be vaccinated against by priming the immune system to recognise the pathogen and building armies of immune cells to attack it if it invades the body. A vaccine against measles, for example, introduces a highly weakened strain of the disease into the body. This allows the immune system to target the responsible bacteria, deal with them, and prepare defences for attacks in the future. But TB is more complicated as it is able to hide inside cells and avoid normal antibodies. Instead it requires a subgroup of white blood cells, called T cells, to be activated, which are better at seeking out the bug to destroy it.
Immunologists have begun to use recombinant viruses to teach the body how to recognise TB bacteria and prepare its T cells correspondingly. These are modified viruses that carry cloned genes containing a simple protein, harvested from the disease to be fought. The "tweaked" virus is harmless to human beings. It arrives in the body, unloads the cloned protein, and dies. The protein, however, is spotted by the immune system, which prepares T cells for attack. Afterwards, the patient's body is left ready for further invasion.
Dr McShane found that her vaccine worked particularly well at boosting the weak immune response primed by the traditional BCG. "It would be fantastic if this vaccine was proven to work and became available," she says. "It's been a huge team effort with units in The Gambia and South Africa and Oxford working to a common end. The real challenges now are to see if it really does stop people getting TB, and if it does, to make sure that it gets to the people who need it."
Source
British airport screening adds inconvenience but no security: "Britain's airport screening policies inconvenience passengers without boosting security according to the head of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). "Harmonised security measures across borders are more important than ever," IATA General Director Giovanni Bisignani said in a ciritical statement on first half civil aviation statistics. He said "governments must focus much more on further harmonisation to ensure that effective security is also convenient for passengers." "A particular focus will be the UK, where unique screening policies inconvenience passengers with no improvement in security. "The only beneficiary is the airport operator - BAA - that continues to deliver embarrassingly low service levels by failing to invest in appropriate equipment and staff to meet demand. This must stop."
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