Quotulatiousness

December 1, 2012

The problem with flood insurance

Filed under: Britain, Economics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Talking about a very topical issue in Britain, Tim Harford explains why flood insurance is so expensive for some areas:

I’m not sure this is really an insurance problem.

How could it not be an insurance problem?

It seems to me that there are three kinds of hard-to-insure risks. First, there are unimaginable events, “unknown unknowns”, if you like. Yet floods are all too easy to imagine. Then there are risks that are subject to what economists call adverse selection. To take an extreme example, imagine a town ruled by some all-powerful Mob. Nobody in this town is ever robbed without warning. The Mob will be sure to let you know what’s coming to you and why they think you deserve it.

[. . .]

But that doesn’t sound like a good description of flood risk.

Quite so. Now the third kind of hard-to-insure risk is stuff that’s expensive and happens quite often. I’m trying to buy a house, I’m nearly 40 and so I’m trying to buy insurance for my family in case I die or become too ill to work. This is perfectly possible: it’s just expensive, because it’s not unusual for middle-aged men to get seriously ill. This sounds like a much better description of allegedly uninsurable homes: if there is a one in five chance of a flood, and a flood is going to cost £50,000, don’t expect to pay less than £10,000 a year for flood insurance.

But that’s unaffordable for a lot of people.

Yes, but unaffordability is not uninsurability. It’s insurable but expensive.

November 29, 2012

Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

In History Today, Paul Lay talks about the power of well-written historical fiction to raise interest in real history:

The case of Richard III was long ago examined in a historical novel, which has come to recent public prominence due to its championing by the High Tory journalist Peter Hitchens and the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, an incongruous pairing if ever there was one. The subject of their mutual admiration is Josephine Tey’s 1951 thriller, her last, The Daughter of Time. It takes its title from Francis Bacon’s adage — ‘Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority’ — and features Tey’s fictional detective, Inspector Alan Grant. At the start of the novel he has broken his leg and is recuperating in hospital. There he is handed a reproduction of a contemporary portrayal of Richard III. Grant fancies himself as a great judge of character and is convinced that the king he sees before him is a kindly and wise character, the very opposite of the Shakespearean monster. With his leg on the mend, Grant heads off to the British Museum to research the truth about the king’s life.

Grant’s conclusion makes The Daughter of Time a firm favourite with members of the Richard III Society, apostles of the last Plantagenet, for the inspector convinces himself that Richard III is indeed a victim of the Tudor propaganda machine. We can believe that or not, but what makes The Daughter of Time such a compelling read is not its rather flimsy conclusion but its extraordinary depiction of process, for few books have so vividly brought to life the historian’s quest, the desire to reveal exactly what happened in the past and the methods used to discover that truth. That’s why historians love it. Beard found it an inspiring work: it ‘partly made me a historian’, she claims; while Hitchens praises Tey’s ‘clarity of mind’; her ‘loathing of fakes and propaganda are like pure, cold spring water in a weary land’.

November 28, 2012

Is English really a Scandinavian language?

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

ESR on some recent linguistic speculation:

Here’s the most interesting adventure in linguistics I’ve run across in a while. Two professors in Norway assert that English is a Scandinavian language, a North Germanic rather than a West Germanic one. More specifically, they claim that Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”) is not the direct ancestor of modern English; rather, our language is more closely related to the dialect of Old Norse spoken in the Danelaw (the Viking-occupied part of England) after about 865.

[. . .]

Previously on this blog my commenters and I have kicked around the idea that English is best understood as the result of a double creolization process — that it evolved from a contact pidgin formed between Anglo-Saxon and Danelaw Norse. The creole from that contact then collided, a century later, with Norman French. Wham, bam, a second contact pidgin forms; English is the creole descended from the language of (as the SF writer H. Beam Piper famously put it) “Norman soldiers attempting to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids”.

This is not so different from the professors’ account, actually. They win if the first creole, the barmaids’ milk language, was SVO with largely Norse grammar and some Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. The conventional history of English would have the girls speaking an SOV/V2 language with largely Anglo-Saxon grammar and some Norse vocabulary.

70 years later, “don’t wish Beveridge a happy birthday”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:06

In sp!ked, Rob Lyons looks back at the 1942 Beveridge Report and what it led to:

On 2 December 1942, the UK government published the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, usually referred to as the Beveridge Report after its chair, the social reformer (and eugenicist) William Beveridge. The report is commonly regarded as a watershed in the development of the welfare state in Britain, a sign that we were becoming a more civilised and humane society. But the seventieth anniversary of the report on Saturday will no doubt prompt much handwringing about the system that the report helped to create.

[. . .]

The fact that the report’s recommendations were largely implemented by a Labour government, elected after the Second World War ended in 1945, has led to the creation of a myth that these were somehow ‘radical’ or ‘socialist’ policies. In fact, the general assumption that the state had to step in to reorganise and manage large swathes of society had been broadly accepted both before and particularly during the war. Compulsory national insurance had been introduced in a limited way in 1911 and state pensions had been enacted, for the very few people who lived past the age of 70, in 1908. The first call for a national health service came from the distinctly un-radical think tank, Political and Economic Planning, in 1937 — a call which was backed by the British Medical Association a year later.

[. . .]

Beveridge also built his belief in social insurance on another idea: that it was the function of the state to ensure full employment. Beveridge was inspired by the establishment’s new ideologue-in-chief, John Maynard Keynes; ideas about planning and state management of the economy started to become all the rage. The welfare bill would never become too large, Beveridge assumed, because the government would never let unemployment get out of hand. Individuals suffering temporary unemployment would be covered by their insurance contributions. In any event, it was widely assumed that people would, by and large, be too proud and independent to abuse the system and would choose work over welfare.

Yet as the decades passed, the welfare state expanded. The notion of a connection between national-insurance contributions and entitlements has pretty much disappeared. Now there is an amorphous sense of entitlement to welfare, regardless of one’s contributions. The state has positively encouraged this sentiment even as politicians have attacked ‘scroungers’ rhetorically.

For example, incapacity benefit has been expanded, so that millions of people who could work but are not currently employed are effectively told not to bother looking for jobs. This suited politicians when it became abundantly clear that full employment was gone, never to return. Taking those who might struggle to find work off the dole figures, and putting them on benefits that are not reliant upon them looking for work, might seem like a humane or generous thing to do. But in truth, the incapacity system effectively disabled them, by officially branding them ‘incapable’ — a label which many of these people have now internalised.

November 27, 2012

Coyne: Carney’s departure is probably for the best

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

Aside from the ousting of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, the other big story in Canadian media yesterday was the announcement that Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney will be leaving to take over the Bank of England next year:

Inevitably, there are mixed feelings: satisfaction that a Canadian civil servant should be held in such regard abroad; annoyance that a foreign power should feel entitled to raid our highest offices, as if we were their farm team; gratitude for his service; disappointment that he did not finish his term.

On balance, however, the departure of Mark Carney as governor of the Bank of Canada, to take on the same position at the Bank of England, is probably for the best. It will of course be a great loss: he is largely deserving of his exalted reputation. That’s the point: he was becoming too big for the Bank. His ambitions were known to stretch beyond it; his persona was starting to overshadow it. Rock stars and central banks make an uncomfortable fit.

[. . .]

But ultimately, it’s the institution that counts, not the man. The Bank is steeped in talent, and any successor will be able to draw on the same organizational strengths as Carney. And Carney’s own outsized talents, it must be said, were beginning to present a problem, or at least might have. Politically savvy, a natural communicator, possessed of a certain glamour (at least by central banker standards), and young enough to harbour ambitions beyond his current office, it was perhaps inevitable that he should excite speculation about his future plans, without ever intending to.

All the same, it was unhealthy that talk began to turn to the possibility of him running for Liberal leader, and unhealthier still that this was not more firmly squelched, sooner. I’ve no reason to believe he ever seriously considered doing so, but it would have been a terrible business if he had. It is unusual enough for a governor to leave one country’s central bank for another. But for a governor to resign to lead the party seeking to replace the government he had lately served? I do not think the people who were urging this course upon Carney thought this through.

Update: At the Telegraph, Iain Martin reminds Carney’s sudden horde of fans that he’s merely mortal.

Is there any stopping Carney-mania? Those of us who 24 hours ago couldn’t have identified Mark Carney, even if he was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “I’m the Governor of the Canadian Central Bank” in 110pt type, now stroke our chins and swap our best Carney insights. He was voted the most trustworthy Canadian in a poll conducted by Readers Digest (Canada). He has four children. He paid $800,000 for his house in Ottawa, apparently, although he undertook $95,000 of improvements. Did they extend out the back or convert the attic? I don’t know, yet. And Canada didn’t have a banking crisis, you know. Only it did, in the 1990s, and the recovery and reorganisation put it in place afterwards left it in good shape ahead of the much bigger financial crisis which hit the US and the UK particularly hard. And Canada knows how to regulate its banks, only that wasn’t actually Carney’s job. This is most of what we know so far.

[. . .]

Now Carney is hailed as “the world’s greatest central banker”. None of this is to knock the Canadian for a second. He seems like a sensible, pragmatic fellow with a good record. It is also pleasing to see a fresh face, someone not from the revolving door cast-list of the British establishment. Although it is worth remembering that he is from the new global establishment, via 13 years at Goldman Sachs and subsequent sessions on panels at Davos.

The UK certainly needs this appointment to work out, but the new arrival deserves continuous scrutiny from sceptical parliamentarians and, yes, from a (hopefully) free press. After all, Mark Carney is a banker, not a magician.

November 26, 2012

New child abuse panic in Britain

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

In sp!ked, Neil Davenport talks about the ongoing child abuse panic that is gripping Britain, and contrasts it with the 1987 horror show that was the investigation into systematic child abuse in Middlesbrough:

In retrospect, it is suggested, the move in recent years towards intrusive policing of family life, and in particular working-class family life, was a positive and enlightened development. Incredibly, the re-evaluation of the policing of the family as an enlightened thing has included attempts to rehabilitate the long-discredited Cleveland child-abuse scandal of 1987, when 121 children were removed by social workers in Middlesbrough on the grounds that their parents had abused them. That scandal was closely followed by allegations of child-abuse rings in Rochdale and Orkney in 1990. In each case, the vast majority of the allegations were found to be false. Yet now, in the wake of the Savile scandal, broadsheet journalists claim that the ‘public fury’ against the paediatricians who made the Cleveland allegations was ‘too simplistic’. It created a ‘saga of rogue doctors and wronged parents’, which doesn’t capture the reality of what happened in Cleveland, apparently. In other words, the suggestion is that there was some truth in the Cleveland allegations, and that the state must rediscover its nerve to interfere wholesale into suspicious communities.

[. . .]

As has been previously argued on spiked, it was from the mid-1980s onwards that child abuse took centre stage in the national consciousness. In 1986, the founding of Esther Rantzen’s ChildLine gave credence to the growing belief that children were no longer safe in their own homes or communities. This paedophile panic, largely driven by figures from the political left, reached its devastating pinnacle in Cleveland in 1987. Here, two paediatricians, Dr Marietta Higgs and Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, became convinced that the widespread rape of young children was taking place in this part of Middlesbrough.

Higgs and Wyatt based their evidence on a technique called reflex anal dilation, which would supposedly detect signs of sexual assault. After Higgs had experimented on her own children and found a negative result, she concluded that any positive result must mean that other children had been abused. Despite it being too small a control group to give any definitive answers, the dubious test and results were still enough evidence for the state effectively to kidnap and contain over 100 children and arrest their parents.

[. . .]

This resulted in the setting up of a public inquiry, led by Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, which examined instances where sexual abuse was said to have taken place. In these cases, the courts subsequently dismissed the charges against the vast majority of the parents. During the inquiry, it was revealed that social workers were driven by malignant prejudices rather by any sense of duty or professionalism. In video-recorded interviews with the allegedly abused children, social workers were seen threatening and attempting to bribe the children in order to make them confirm social workers’ belief that they had been abused. Leading questions were asked of the children, which would not have been permitted in court.

The impact on the children and the accused parents was devastating. It took some of the innocent parents two years to get their children back home. For years afterwards, the children and parents of Cleveland reported being terrified of any knock on the door. One of the children taken away by the authorities said recently: ‘We were abused by the very people — the doctors and social workers — there to protect children. We were essentially put up for adoption. My father now says he did not dare even put a towel around me at the public swimming pool for years. He was afraid of cuddling us in public. My parents’ lives have been shattered.’

“[W]e must rewrite the history distorted by that, ahem, writer from Stratford”

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

More on the project to determine if the remains discovered in Leicester are those of Richard III:

Whether the bones prove to be Richard’s or not, the discovery in September has already set academic journals, websites, university lecture circuits and the mainstream media abuzz across Britain, sparking intense and occasionally impolite exchanges. On the floor of the House of Commons, members of Parliament are eloquently clashing, with representatives from York — for whom Richard was the last hope against rival Lancastrians in the War of the Roses — demanding the restoration of his tarnished image. One organization of die-hard Richard III supporters (there are at least two) is running a national ad campaign to clear the king’s name.

There are even calls for a state funeral, giving the medieval king a send-off steeped in the pomp and circumstance of contemporary Britain.

“I suppose we won’t dash off to the Folger Library in Washington and destroy the First Folio, but we must rewrite the history distorted by that, ahem, writer from Stratford,” Hugh Bayley, a member of Parliament from York, said with tongue only partly planted in cheek. “The fact that a Mr. Shakespeare decided to write some play about a hunchback shouldn’t blacken the name of a fine, upstanding defender of country.”

Yet if the remains are indeed those of the long-lost sovereign — something archaeologists call extremely likely — it also raises a conundrum: Where to bury one of England’s most demonized characters?

Under Church of England protocol, the bones, should they prove to be Richard’s, appear destined to end up in the cathedral at Leicester, the city where the remains were found. But many insist they should instead go to the Anglican cathedral in York, the city where history suggests that he wanted to rest. Still others question whether burial should be in an Anglican cathedral at all, as he died a Roman Catholic, reigning by the grace of God and the pope.

WW1 slang that became part of everyday English

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Jasper Copping lists a surprising number of words that entered the civilian language thanks to the linguistic creativity of soldiers in the trenches during the First World War:

If you’re feeling washed out, fed up or downright lousy, World War One is to blame.

New research has shown how the conflict meant that hundreds of words and phrases came into common parlance thanks to the trenches.

Among the list of everyday terms found to have originated or spread from the conflict are cushy, snapshot, bloke, wash out, conk out, blind spot, binge drink and pushing up daisies.

The research has been conducted by Peter Doyle, a military historian, and Julian Walker, an etymologist, who have analysed thousands of documents from the period — including letters from the front, trench newspapers, diaries, books and official military records — to trace how language changed during the four years of the war.

They found that the war brought military slang into the mainstream, imported French and even German words to English and saw words from local dialects become part of national conversation.

It was a “world” war, so the linguistic additions came from further afield than Belgium or France:

Several Hindi terms, picked up from Indian Army soldiers and already circulating in the regular, professional army, were also disseminated widely.

One of those most used at the front was “cushy” — from khush (‘pleasure’).

Soldiers would describe cushy, or comfortable billets, as well as cushy trenches, in quiet sectors.

The most well known term derived from Hindi though was “Blighty”, from bilati, meaning “foreign”, which, when applied by Indians to Britons, came to be perceived by Indian Army servicemen as the term “British”.

Words even entered the lexicon from the trenches opposite. “Strafe” became an English word, from the German “to punish”, via a prominent slogan used by the enemy: “Gott Strafe England”, while prisoners of war returned with term “erzatz”, literally “replacement”, but used in English to mean “cheap substitute” and spelled ersatz.

November 25, 2012

UK bureaucrat removes foster children from home of UKIP supporters

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

I heard about this case yesterday, and I’d hoped that it was just a mangling of the report, not an appallingly bad exercise of municipal power:

The stunning decision by Rotherham Council to remove three children from a foster home (where they were happy) because the foster parents support UKIP shows that the “culture war” here in Britain is being waged not by the Right, but by the Left.

Joyce Thacker, the council’s director of children, who said her decision was influenced by UKIP’s sceptical take on multiculturalism, is the mirror image of those mad American right-wingers who want to outlaw abortion clinics and homosexuals. Unlike them, though, she is in a position of power. Hers is the latest in a series of increasingly chilling actions of this nature taken by bien-pensant officials.

[. . .]

The special interest of the Rotherham case — and no doubt why Ed Miliband was so quick to condemn it — is that in five days’ time the town has a parliamentary by-election. Labour is already in a bit of trouble here — about 80 of the 114 members present at the meeting to select its candidate walked out in protest after the favourite, local man Mahroof Hussain, was excluded from the shortlist. Many of them said they wouldn’t campaign for the woman Labour chose, Sarah Champion.

November 23, 2012

Google the latest whipping boy in Australia over taxation

Filed under: Australia, Business, Europe, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Even if you scrupulously obey the multiple jurisdictional laws to legally minimize the amount of tax you pay, politicians can’t resist the opportunity to pillory you for not paying your “fair share”:

The Minister’s explanation of Google’s tax affairs is as follows:

    “While the day-to-day dealings of Australian firms advertising on Google might be with Google Australia, under the fine print of contracts Australian firms sign with Google, they are actually buying their advertising from an Irish subsidiary of Google.

    It is then argued that the source of this income — and therefore the taxing rights under our tax treaty — would be with Ireland rather than Australia. Despite Ireland’s relatively low company tax rate of 12.5 per cent, we have just started to build the sandwich.

    The next step is to route a royalty payment from the Irish operating subsidiary of Google to a Dutch subsidiary of Google, which is then paid back to a second Irish holding company subsidiary of Google that is controlled in Bermuda, which has no corporate tax.

    The first Irish subsidiary receives a tax deduction for the royalty payment to the Dutch subsidiary, substantially reducing the income subject to the 12.5 per cent Irish company tax rate.

    Under Dutch law, and because EU member countries do not charge withholding taxes on transfers within the EU, the transfers to and from the Netherlands are essentially tax free.

    And under Irish tax law, the second Irish resident subsidiary is not taxed on the royalty payment because it is controlled by managers elsewhere.

    The profits from the sale of advertising to an Australian firm then sit in a tax-free jurisdiction — possibly indefinitely.”

Tax lawyers — especially those who work on multinational levels — don’t create these situations out of whole cloth: it’s the politicians and revenue ministries that set up and maintain the tax rules. Corporations are legally required to pay taxes (as are individuals), but corporations are also legally required to conduct themselves in ways that maximize the profits for their shareholders. Finding ways to legally pay tax at a lower rate is a requirement. That companies like Apple and Google are big enough to take advantage of the “loopholes” deliberately created by the tax authorities is not a reason to bash Apple or Google. They can only take advantage of “loopholes” because this or that government tried to rig the system in a particular way. Changing or threatening to change the rules retrospectively is a really good way to indicate to foreign business that you really don’t want them operating in your territory.

Update: Snigger.

November 21, 2012

Piltdown Man

Filed under: Britain, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

History Today tweeted that today is the anniversary of the exposure of the Piltdown Man hoax in 1953:

Once cited as the ‘missing link’ between man and beast and definitive proof of the theory of evolution, the Piltdown Man was exposed as a hoax in 1953. Eoanthropus Dawsoni was ‘excavated’ in 1912 by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson from a shallow gravel pit in Piltdown, Sussex. Great excitement greeted his find, as at the time fewer than five human fossils had been discovered and most of those were incomplete, their dates uncertain and — almost worst of all at a time of intense imperial rivalry — they were foreign. France and Belgium had long boasted Neanderthal skeletons. Germany had Heidelburg Man. Now here, at last, was the first great British palaeoanthropological find. The Piltdown Man, as he was immediately dubbed, was the ‘first Englishman’ and he caused a world sensation.

[. . .]

As time passed and more evidence was disinterred, Piltdown Man became more and more of an anomaly, marginalised in evolutionary theory but remaining on the syllabus. Students were writing dissertations on Piltdown in the 1950s. Then in 1953, following a lecture on Piltdown at the British Museum, South African born Doctor Joseph S. Weiner had an epiphany on the train home to Oxford: Piltdown had to be a fraud.

With his friend and colleague Geoffrey Ainsworth Harrison, who is now the Professor of Biological Anthropology at Oxford, Weiner set about collecting as much evidence as he could before approaching the Head of the Anatomy Department at Oxford, Professor Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark. Using the latest scientific techniques, including fluorine measurement and radiocarbon dating, the team proved that the mandible of Eoanthropus Dawsoni had been deliberately stained with potassium bichromate and the teeth filed down. The jaw was later shown to have come from an orangutan.

November 20, 2012

50 years later: Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

It’s being called “one of the most significant books of the 20th Century”, and it was published 50 years ago this month:

The character was fictional. But there were millions like him — innocent citizens who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, had been sent to the Gulag in Joseph Stalin’s wave of terror.

Censorship and fear had prevented the truth about the camps from being published, but this story made it into print. The USSR would never be the same again.

“We were absolutely isolated from information, and he started to open our eyes,” remembers writer and journalist Vitaly Korotich.

[. . .]

It was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who had sanctioned publication of Solzhenitsyn’s novel nearly a decade after Stalin’s death. Allowing a book on the Gulag, he thought, would help debunk Stalin’s personality cult. However, one story sparked many more.

“After it was published, it was impossible to stop it,” Korotich recalls. “Immediately we received a lot of illegal publications. A lot of people who were in prison started to remember how it was.

Undervaluing, denigrating the role of the family in a child’s life

Filed under: Britain, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

In sp!ked, Tim Black takes issue with the blithe paternalistic comment by a British government minister that children should be more frequently removed from their homes and put into “care”:

Still, it is a dubious testament to Gove’s eloquence that he gave a striking expression to the state’s usurpation of the role traditionally played by adult family members. As he put it, ‘the rights of biological parents’ have for too long been treated as precious. It is time, Gove is saying, for these filial bonds, which have been central to society for centuries, to be demystified, disenchanted. After all, what is a mother or a father, or a daughter or a son, other than an arbitrary accident of nature? The words signify nothing more valuable than a set of random ‘biological’ outcomes. To privilege certain adult-child relationships on the basis of biology is to succumb to the allure of tradition, and to condemn many children to a lifetime of misery. ‘In all too many cases when we decide to leave children in need with their biological parents’, Gove concluded, ‘we are leaving them to endure a life of soiled nappies and scummy baths, chaos and hunger, hopelessness and despair’.

With the family blithely dismantled, and the roles of father and mother treated as little more than semiotic jetsam, Gove was able to propose his alternative to biology: the artifice of the state. ‘I firmly believe more children should be taken into care more quickly and that too many children are allowed to stay too long with parents whose behaviour is unacceptable. I want social workers to be more assertive with dysfunctional parents, courts to be less indulgent of poor parents, and the care system to expand to deal with the consequences.’

Gove’s is a frightening vision. As the meaning and value of being mum or dad is actively reduced by politicians to mere biological facts — in short, as tradition is wilfully disenchanted — so it becomes easier for the state, through its various agents, to assume the role of guardian. The result, complete with empowered or ‘more assertive’ social workers, and their correlative, impotent and less assertive parents, is a society with ever increasing numbers of children placed into Britain’s far from distinguished care system.

Quite why this scenario is considered progressive is not entirely clear. Living with a mum or a dad deemed ‘bad’ or ‘poor’ by a social worker would surely, in many cases, be far better for a child than surviving, parentless, even in a vastly improved care system. Besides, while Gove might not care to acknowledge it, the bond between parents and their children is not merely biological; it is possessed of considerable human and social value, too. Parents do not simply love their children; they help to socialise them, and act as a source of authority. To seek to erode this bond even further than it has been is deeply reckless.

November 18, 2012

UK voters turning against EU in latest polling

Filed under: Britain, Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

In the Guardian, Daniel Boffey and Toby Helm report on the rising tide of anti-EU sentiment among British voters:

Well over half of British voters now want to leave the European Union, according to an opinion poll that shows anti-EU sentiment is sweeping through all three main political parties.

The Opinium/Observer survey finds that 56% of people would probably or definitely vote for the UK to go it alone if they were offered the choice in a referendum. About 68% of Conservative voters want to leave the EU, against 24% who want to remain; 44% of Labour voters would probably choose to get out, against 39% who would back staying in, while some 39% of Liberal Democrats would probably or definitely vote to get out, compared with 47% who would prefer to remain in the EU.

The findings will make sobering reading for all three major parties, which are at risk of losing support to the buoyant anti-EU party Ukip — now two points ahead of the Lib Dems on 10%.

Overall just 28% of likely voters think the EU is a “good thing” while 45% think it is a “bad thing”. The 18-34 age group is the only one in which there is a clear majority backing the EU, with 44% saying membership is good, against 25%.

November 15, 2012

The BBC’s 28 secret climate change advisors

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

The BBC has been prominent among media outlets for their relentless proclamations on the dangers of climate change. Despite the BBC’s charter requiring them to provide balanced coverage, in this particular area they have been cheerleaders for one particular message: that climate change is DOOM!

In 2006, the BBC convened a panel of climate change experts to advise them on the topic, and the corporation took the advice of that panel to heart and has been pushing the climate change = disaster meme ever since. Blogger Tony Newbery submitted a FOI request to find out who had been on the panel which had swung the BBC so far away from their charter, but his request was denied. Not just denied, but fought out in court at an estimated cost of £40,000 per day.

The BBC won in court, but the information was released by someone else:

Sadly for the BBC, another enterprising blogger called Maurizio Morabito unearthed the details anyway and published them on Monday via the website Watts Up With That?

So who were all these ‘best scientific experts’ who did so much to shape the BBC’s climate policy (and by extension, one fears, government policy too…)? Well, two were from Greenpeace; one was from Stop Climate Chaos; one was a CO2 reduction expert from BP; one was from Npower Renewables; one came from the left-leaning New Economics Foundation… Only five of those present could, in any way, be considered scientists with disciplines even vaguely relevant to ‘climate change’. And of these, every one had a track record of climate alarmism. No wonder the BBC tried so hard to keep the list of 28 a secret. Its claim that its policy change was based on the ‘best scientific’ expertise turns out to have been a massive lie.

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