A Dunning resolution

John Redwood is inviting readers to suggest the wording for a new Dunning resolution. And if, like me, you'd never heard of one of these before it's probably worth your reading it on those grounds alone.

Ellee on biofuels

Via Peter Risdon, Ellee Seymour's latest venture into the world of climate science is a shocker.

Ellee links approvingly to Conservative MEP Robert Sturdy's letter extolling the (alleged) virtues of biofuels.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, quite mad and possibly evil too. The lemming-like dash towards biofuels has driven world grain prices inexorably upwards, leading to price inflation and all the suffering that brings. The reaction of governments in many producer countries has been to slap export taxes on grain exports - for example China, Argentina - or imposing export quotas like Vietnam. This has made things even worse. Unrest is becoming widespread -

Clashes over bread in Egypt killed at least two people last week, and similar food riots broke out in Burkina Faso and Cameroon this month.

Farmers in Argentina have pledged to continue a nationwide protest after the government refused to back down on tax rises on agricultural exports.

See also Mexico, Italy (!), etc.

Everybody with the slightest bit of sense is jumping off the biofuels bandwagon post-haste:

The government's chief environmental scientist has called for a halt to their deployment. 

A UN specialist on food availability says that biofuels are a crime against humanity. 

Even the not-very-bright people in the government are starting to backtrack. 

Everyone who gives a damn is against biofuels, so why on earth is Robert Sturdy for them? Can he really not have heard that  they're a disaster. Or could it possibly be because he is a big arable farmer who will derive huge benefits from high grain prices? Tell me it ain't so.

So when I say everyone who gives a damn, what I should have said was "everyone who gives a damn about people other than themselves".

No alternative

Martin Ivens in the Sunday Times hits the nail pretty squarely on the head on the subject of whether the Conservatives are actually offering alternative NHS policies to Labour.

If Lansley tells an audience of doctors and nurses that the Conservatives will no longer fiddle with the NHS like new Labour, he will get easy applause. Health workers are truly fed up with obtuse management and endless Whitehall directives. But after the clapping has died down he should ask that room whether the NHS should continue as it is...
 
...David Cameron, you present yourself as the future, the new politics. If you don’t offer the prime minister a challenge on health reform then another decade will be wasted. By not rocking the boat you think you will get more votes. Maybe. But you’ll be passing up a great opportunity and we will all be the losers.

It's not just health policy where the Conservatives are offering a policy of "the same but better". Here's the Shadow Education Secretary, Michael Gove:

Tomorrow, parents across the country will find out if their children have got into their first-choice school. I vividly remember last year when I, like thousands of other parents, faced a nerve-shredding few weeks to see if my daughter had got into her preferred school. She was lucky and now she's enjoying a superb education at a fine state primary. But the experience reinforced my conviction that parents shouldn't have to endure this anxiety and a good state education shouldn't be a matter of chance. It should be a right.

What makes this year's admissions roulette even more tense is the pressure by the Government to micro-manage the process. Schools face new rules and parents new barriers when it comes to exercising choice. Head teachers have been warned not even to talk to parents lest those who are committed to finding out more about a particular school secure an unfair advantage. And the bureaucrat in charge of this process is threatening even more lotteries to come. As someone who believes totally in state education I understand why it's important to do what we can to make opportunity more equal.

If even the Conservatives can't see that it's the "state" bit of "state education" which is the problem, heaven help us.  

Different priorities

Two news stories from recent days could be seen as highlighting a different sense of priorities among the two main parties:

Conservative MPs propose recall motions against errant MPs

Labour (and one Lib(?)Dem) MPs sign early day motion praising Fidel Castro

I suppose we should be grateful that some of our elected representatives are still trying. 

The fallacy of composition

Lord Mancroft has said that he was appalled by the standards of nursing he received from the NHS:

Lord Mancroft claimed that it was “a miracle” that he was still alive after his experience of filthy wards and “slipshod and lazy” nurses when he was admitted to an NHS hospital in the West Country, believed to be the Royal United Hospital in Bath.

On occasions like this, the standard defence is to adopt the fallacy of composition and pretend that the criticism was being made of the whole industry rather than just particular members of it.

Mr Cameron was swift to act. Aides said he was furious and has asked Lord Strathclyde to rebuke Lord Mancroft. His views were not shared by the Conservative Party, which knew that nurses did a fantastic job, often in difficult circumstances, a spokesman said.

Dave has clearly picked up a lot from studying Labour's modus operandi, but the public sector can still teach him a thing or two. The nurses union claims that Mancroft was bitching about the whole of the female sex! 

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said Lord Mancroft’s comments were “grossly unfair on nurses across the UK” and amounted to a “sexist insult about the behaviour of British women.”

Fallacious argument aside, you would have thought they might actually investigate his claims first, before condemning him. It's not as if he's the first person to say things like this about NHS hospitals, and he'll not be the last either. Longrider Peter Risdonhas his own NHS horror story to relate.

The NHS will never get better if we're not allowed to criticise it. 

Rolling back the last ten years

With all the polls predicting a Conservative government at the next election, it's reasonable to question what changes a Cameron government might make when they finally take control. To what extent might they be ready to roll back the last ten years of the expansion of the state, the erosion of civil liberties and corruption of civil society?

Do you think that Cameron will return habeus corpus to three days? Do you think he will privatise the schools or the hospitals, or restore the right to protest in the vicinity of parliament?

Me neither.

Assuming then that he continues with the policies of the Labour party; that the schools continue to decline, that the hospitals are hotbeds of infectious disease (if you can even manage to get an appointment). Suppose that detention without charge gets extended to forty or fifty days and that a whole plethora of new reasons to demand entry to your home are written into law.

What then?

Will people abandon political parties completely, and abandon the polling booth completely. Or will they switch to peripheral and/or extremist parties?

It seems to me that it doesn't actually matter, so long as they do one or the other. Any long-term solution to the political impasse into which the Lab/Con duopoly have driven us has to involve the death of both heads of the political monster which threatens us. Now some people might find this rather alarming - as any vote for an unfamiliar party can unnerve some - but when you think about it, it's not as alarming as being locked up for three months without charge because someone in government doesn't like the colour of your shirt, which seems to be the way things are heading at the moment.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I am lost to mainstream politics. They are all crooks, and they are all corrupt, and until they are all strung up from Westminster lampposts, or at least consigned to the political dustbin, we are all in danger.

Conservative cretins

I just made the huge mistake of taking a look at the Conservatives' new Stand Up Speak Up website. Never in all my years have I seen such a collection of cretinous half-arsed half-witted half-formed twaddle. The schools system is completely mindbogglingly disfunctional and numpty Cameron's thinks we might like to consider better links with the community! Or perhaps a little training for head-teachers of schools in deprived areas! What a pillock!

God this slimy man and his party of slack-jawed inbred goons make me want to puke.

The Conservatives - they're like your local council but not as bright and not as nice.

/rage. 

Good education due around 2050...perhaps

David Willett's speech to the CBI on the subject of education is set out in full in the Telegraph today. It's a good source for a more detailed discussion of some of the issues I raised in my post on the self-flagellation over grammar schools which is besotting and consuming the Conservatives at the moment.

A few stand-out points:

We already have more per capita funding than in the past and we officially have a system of school choice. But it hasn't transformed educational standards as we hoped. This is because there are no mechanisms in place to enable successful schools to expand, to take over failing schools or for new schools to be created.

So why don't you privatise them, you silly billy?

It is the failure to open up the supply side which is the reason why, despite years of ambitious attempts at education reform, Britain now lags behind many other advanced western countries.

Correct. So what have your two brains decided to do about it?

We must make it easier for people, including parents themselves, to set up new schools. New school providers must be able to enter the maintained sector, responding to what parents want. This is not how the system works at the moment.

Why do you want a maintained sector? You are trying to set schools free, aren't you? If they are in the maintained sector then governments can tie them up in red tape. You are playing into the hands of Whitehall and the teaching unions, Mr Two Brains.

[Blair] proposed, for example, that no new schools should be created by local authorities - a powerful device for bringing new providers incrementally into the maintained sector.

And you support this why, exactly? Do you think I want incremental change? What you are saying is that, for the majority of people, you are offering a good education to their grandchildren. And then only if a future Labour government doesn't reverse it all and hand the schools back to the teaching unions. It will be Railtrack all over again. 

At the heart of our education reforms is creating, in Tony Blair's words, 'self-governing independent state schools'. 

Oxymoron. Moron. Two brains, and both demented.

Bloody hell.

Gove on Cameron

Listening to Any Questions just now, Michael Gove was asked whether his ability to speak freely was restricted by David Cameron. Gove replied that Cameron doesn't believe in any restrictions at all.

Given that Cameron has said that no frontbench spokesman may call for withdrawl from the EU, this was a lie. 

The moral measure of David Cameron

The behaviour of politicians is usually revolting and their actions in trying to hide their expenses behind an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act is more than usually stomach churning.

This is a black and white issue. Honest people respond by saying "No". Anything else is just another way of admitting that you're a crook. David Cameron responds by saying he's neutral. This tells us something about him. Either he doesn't know right from wrong, or he has good reasons for tolerating a certain level of corruption among his MPs.

It also tells us that we shouldn't under any circumstances, vote for him or the pondlife that surround him.

Patrick Mercer

I find the whole farrago over Patrick Mercer completely unedifying. We can't go on having people like Mercer and Bob Piper driven out of their jobs because they touch on race in some unapproved way. It's stifling any sensible debate, and the only winners will be the BNP.