NGOs in Columbia

After the Betancourt rescue in Columbia, a few eyebrows were raised when it was revealed that the rescuers had claimed that they were from an NGO and were removing the hostages to another location on behalf of the kidnappers' organisation, FARC. What, they wondered, does the kidnappers' ready acceptance that an NGO was assisting them in this way tell us about the role of NGOs in the country?

The headline currently running on the BBC website is that the President of Columbia has apologised that one of the rescuers was wearing Red Cross insignia. Does this mean that the rescuers claimed to be from the Red Cross and that the kidnappers accepted this?

If true, the excrement could soon be hitting the airconditioning.

Tranzis really are socialists

Croydonian has beaten me to a posting on the fatal flaw in today's UNICEF report on child welfare, which ranked British children near the bottom of the scale. The report uses a relative measure of poverty - which as any fule no is essentially building a socialist bias into the report's results before the surveys are even performed. If you are a socialist country you will go straight to GO and collect £200. Anyone else can go straight to jail.

There's lot more wrong with the report, and I strongly urge you to read Croydonian's piece.

This inbuilt bias reminded me of another piece I was going to write; this time one which I actually failed to write at all, on the grounds that fisking Neil Harding was like taking sweeties from a toddler, and was a bit unsporting. But since it's relevant, I'll relay the story here. Neil had a post on public and private sector waste, in which he cited a World Health Organisation report which ranked Britain's healthcare system 18th in the world, and the US one in 37th. Neil invited us to conclude that the NHS gave better outcomes than the US.

However, a cursory look at the report shows exactly the same inbuilt bias as the today's report from UNICEF - it used "fairness of funding" as a measure in the ranking system, and so acheived an artificial boost for socialist systems. If you have a socialist system, it is apparently, by definition, better than the alternatives. We need to remember this next time we are told that the UN is the conscience of the world. It isn't. It's a PR agency for socialism.