Something going down

What's happening to the press? Philip Pullman's article on civil liberties in the Times has disappeared into the ether, as apparently has one in the Daily Mail reporting that the BBC's Robert Peston was acting as a government stooge who was being fed stories by Downing Street that might distract attention from the size of the bale-out. The Mail story is still extant. The Pullman article though now seems to have disappeared from the Google cache too.

Here it is, just in case:

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?

The new laws whisper:

You don’t know who you are

You’re mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

Freedom is too hard for you

We shall decide what freedom is

Sleep, you vermin

Sleep, you scum

On having a revolution

It's often said that the British people no longer care enough about being free to have a revolution. Some do, of course, but the naysayers respond that those who care are too few and too cowed.

I thought of this, when I read the back of a book that was lying on my bookshelves waiting to be read. It was David McCullough's "John Adams", the biography of the second American president which formed the basis of the recent TV series (if you missed it, it was brilliant). Here's the quote:

There was no American nation, no army at the start, no sweeping popular support for rebellion, nor much promise of success. No rebelling people had ever broken free from the grip of colonial empire, and those we call patriots were also celarly traitors to the King.

Maybe we're not so badly positioned after all.

Alcohol Concern: "We're not fakes, honest!"

Good to see that fakecharities.org is back up again, and making an impact to boot. That august publication Charity Finance has posted a news article about the new site, and even goes as far as to quote DK's rationale for setting it up, sweariness and all. That should shock the readers.

There's a couple of limp rebuttals from major charities, for example Alcohol Concern (67% grant-funded), who have this to say:

There’s no consideration in terms of being critical of government when thinking about funding. We are primarily a lobbying charity, we don’t really do public awareness, and if the fact that we get a grant mattered to the work we do we wouldn’t be able to do it.

They don't seem to get the point do they? If nobody is willing to fund your charity on a voluntary basis, that's because nobody values what you do. In fact, most people would probably say that Alcohol Concern is a public menace existing largely for the benefit of its staff.

The answer is clear. Close yourselves down and go and do something useful with your lives.

Know your enemy

Frank Field, writing in the Mail, reminisces about his meetings with Margaret Thatcher while she was PM. It contained this interesting point, which rather seems to support my pet theory that it is the civil service which is the real enemy:

There wasn’t much in her record as Education Secretary in Edward Heath’s Government to suggest she would be a great Prime Minister.

But when she entered No10 she understood she had to get control of the Whitehall machine – and not be bypassed by it, as had occurred with so many of her predecessors.

There's no doubt that both Blair and Brown have been unable to introduce any meaningful reform of Leviathan. They have been ignored by the mandarins and have proved powerless to do anthing about it. The country is therefore left with the slender hope that David Cameron can do any better.

Oh dear.

Perhaps our best hope for salvation lies in a sudden collapse of government finances, sweeping aside the whole state edifice overnight. Painful, perhaps, but quick and decisive.

Too depressing to read?

I'm going to be adding this to my shopping list at Amazon. Not that I need to be any more depressed about the state of the country, but he may have some ideas on what to do about it.

So schools don't indoctrinate do they?

My intemperate rant about Home Education continues to attract interest. If nothing else, it has been useful in publicising the issue.

One thread people may not have seen is by Chris Dillow, who rather misses the point of my post when he gently takes me to task for not providing evidence that HE is better than school. The post was of course about civil liberties and whether the state has a stronger claim on children than the family. It doesn't matter if HE is better or worse on average.

In the comments, Shuggy, himself a schoolteacher, makes light of my suggestion that schools might be indoctrinating children rather than educating them. In my experience it is pretty much naked indoctrination most of the time.

Which brings us to the Englishman's post this morning in which he shows us one of his kids' homework for last night. This isn't indoctrination?

Update on Feb 26, 2009 by Bishop Hill

More reactions to the HE post:

Renegade Parent.

What shall we do today?

More evidence of global warming collapse

I was taken to task the other day for suggesting that the global warming consensus is collapsing. Here's more evidence though:

Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.

Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN's IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.

One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.

Getting round the smoking ban

Taking Liberties:

Hawke and Hunter has only been open a few months but the owners have created a "smoking room" that is even better than Boisdale's famous cigar terrace in London. It has its own bar, comfortable furniture, tropical plants and no shortage of heaters.

I still hate smoke, so I don't suppose I'd go, but you can't help applauding.

Why the stimulus won't work

Charles Steele explains why the various stimulus plans won't work.

Expending scarce resources on useless projects may "put people to work," but it remains consumption of capital, and is simply more of what Adam Smith called decay. The idea that stimulus is stimulus and spending solves problems of capital misallocation is just crazy nonsense. Waste is waste, and it makes us poorer, not wealthier.

(Via Picking losers)

Filling the hole in the national accounts

OK, so we need some money and fast. If you have a look around you, you can see how people deal with this kind of problem in day to day life - they sell assets - shares get flogged, the kids' old toys go on Ebay, the four-by-four gets dumped in favour of something smaller.

The government needs to do the same kind of thing too. There's a lot to flog off, but is it enough to fill the hole? Dunno, because we don't know how big the hole is, but let's see what we think we can get for a firesale of UK assets. Here's a start (valuations per my estimates or per the ASI):

• the BBC £50bn? (something like Time Warner)
• BBC Worldwide £2bn
• Channel 4 £1bn
• Secondary schools (put in a voucher scheme) 4000 schools at £20?m each= £80bn
• Primary schools (ditto) 21,000 schools at £6.5?m = £136bn
• Hospitals (introduce Singapore-style healthcare accounts)
• Universities
• HE colleges
• Scottish Water, £5bn
• Glas Cymru £4bn
• Northern Ireland Water £1bn
• British Energy and Urenco £10bn
• Trust ports £1?bn (Forth Ports x 2)
• Commonwealth Development Corporation (£3bn net assets)
• Royal Mail £4bn

I'm still working on filling in the gaps, but that's £297bn so far. Hospitals and Universities and HE colleges must add quite a lot to that though. I have no idea how to value them though. Anyone got any ideas? School numbers are roughly correct. The cost per school is 50% of the cost of a new-build, which may be a bit on the generous side, given that we know most of the recent capital spending by government is just "invested" up the nearest wall. What's clear from this is that in the wider scheme of things it's only by selling off the education and health sectors that we can hope to plug the gap, which was over £1trillion last time I heard.

Well go on then, get to it.

David Semple on home education

This is a response to an article by David Semple on home education. David Semple is an Oxford-educated teacher and a state-worshipper: the kind of person who has got the country into the authoritarian mess it's in now. I don't normally do swear-blogging, but unfortunately I may have lapsed once or twice during this posting. Semple is basicly a fascist though and I think he deserves it.

Firstly, as a teacher, I’m not willing to be told what I can and can’t empirically examine by a political lobby. Those who provide education in schools are in a position to examine the education provided by home educators.

Bullshit. Teaching one-to-one is completely different to teaching one on thirty. Teachers know precisely nothing about home educated children, either individually or collectively. In fact, teachers know nothing about providing an education to anyone. They don't provide an education in their own schools, they provide indoctrination in left-wingnuttery and environmentalism. David Semple says himself that teachers are not properly trained and that they are delivering a deficient educaiton and yet here he is at the same time saying we should listen to what he and his ilk have to say about home education. The nerve of the man is astonishing.

It may be that the home school lobby don’t want to listen to some of the things which have to be said - but that’s a different issue.

Too right they don't want to listen to you. But you are going to try to force them to listen to you, and moreover to do what you tell them to, anyway. I can think of no better word for this than "fascist".

My concerns are as follows: a) what does the child want

This doesn't bother teachers in schools does it? The child gets the education the school is willing to give them, not the one the child wants. My son wants to learn history and geography and has been told in no uncertain terms that he lump it until high school. This is gross hypocrisy by David Semple, demanding things of home educators that he knows full well are not delivered and can never be delivered in schools.

b) is the child getting the same breadth of education as in a classroom;

Almost certainly. As we've heard in the news this week schools are delivering only English and Maths and not much else, a fact that David Semple even quotes himself! It would be astonishing if home educators could deliver anything quite as crap as Semple and his colleagues manage, and yet here he is questioning HE families.

c) is the child simply being taught to regurgitate the world-view of the parents;

Rather than being taught to regurgitate your worldview I suppose? If I had a penny for every time my children had been indoctrinated into some facet of environmentalism I would be a wealthy man. Oh, but wait a minute, you know better than me, don't you?

d) does the child have access to sufficient resources to support learning to a level equal to that which his or her peers will reach by the same age.

Give tax refunds to home educators. Problem solved. The problem is there is not a teacher in the country who would support this because for these parasites the education system is for feathering their own nests rather than providing a service. And anyway, just how much do you need by way of resources?

All of these things can be measured. I have always been particularly concerned about c) since I know that in the United States, home schooling is increasingly prevalent among extreme Christians and I have seen it suggested that this trend is the same in the UK. If home schooling can be a vehicle to prevent scientific learning, then we should regulate it.

Not only a fascist but an ignorant fascist. Home educators in the UK largely report that religion is not a reason for taking their children out of school. It's because they think that the education provided by Mr Semple and his ilk is crap. And what business is it of yours anyway if parents want to teach their children religious stuff? It doesn't affect you, you fascist prick.

The consequences for science of d) are equally important. If a child is to be kept out of primary school, this is of less importance, but post-11, large swathes of science teaching is practice-led. Titrations, dissections, circuit-building, oscillations and so forth are just some of the practicals for which the equipment is unlikely to be just lying around one’s house.

I am not so narrow minded, of course, to suggest that the lack of this equipment means that home schooling should be dispensed with.

You are pretty narrow-minded though aren't you?

It may simply mean that the LEA should have a remit extending to the provision of such equipment to community centres, where home schooling families can access it. Whether or not it gets used needs to be monitored.

Jesus, can you just for once open your slobbering fascist mouth without demanding that the state monitor somebody. Can you conceive of no human activity that shouldn't be snooped on and checked up on by the state?

I’ve never believed in measuring skirt lengths, tucking in shirts and so forth - and one-to-one teaching obviously gets rid of this sort of requirement. Additional time, with a suitably able parent, also offers the chance for a much broader range of activities - from mechanics to ornithology to wood work. However its a big step from saying, “This is possible” to ensuring that every home schooled child has these opportunities.

Ensuring these opportunities needs to be the responsibility of a body with no intellectual bias towards one form of education or the other - but since primary legislation is the responsibility of the State, it is to the State such a body must answer.

Bullshit again. This is the connection between leftwingnuttery and fascism made plain. "We demand opportunity for everyone and therefore we must have access to your home to check that you are providing it". Why don't you just go ahead and say that you want CCTV in every room to ensure that nobody is doing anything bad?

Collectively, as a society, we have a responsibility to our children - who are not the property of their parents and shouldn’t be treated as such.

And they are the property of "society" are they? You clearly think so. But if you took the trouble to check it out, you would find that children are legally the responsibility of parents. This is why it is not possible to sue the state when your teenagers take to drugs. Are you advocating that this should be possible? Of course not. When you say that children are the "responsibility of society" you don't mean anything of the sort. You are simply demanding a right to indoctrinate them to your personal preferences while avoiding any actual responsibility. It's the same as every other time you deal with the state - interfering busybodies get to tell you what to do but take no responsibility for the outcome. Teachers are not responsible for delivering a shitty education, child welfare officers are not responsible when children die. As soon as the state starts ruining the lives of home educated children they will not be responsible for that either.

Without taking away the right of a child to learn what interests them, there are also certain necessary things every child should know, whether John Holt and his fellow pro-home schoolers want to admit it or not.

Bullshit again. The majority of children come out of our shitty schools without even a semblance of an education and here is this arrogant prick of a teacher claiming that he knows better. The nerve of the man is astonishing.

I’m referring to things like the scientific method, skepticism and all forms of rational argument and the examination of evidence required to support or disprove such an argument.

I wasn't taught any of these things at my shitty bog standard comp. I learned them myself afterwards.

After all, this is a democracy. However distorted our public sphere is by a bias towards Capital, the opinions of the individual still have social consequences. So, as a fellow citizen in a democracy, I want everyone to know about things like evolution and to be able to judge the merits of an argument on the basis of rational thought, not on the basis of prescribed doctrine.

More ignorant prickery. What kind of a semi-educated halfwit thinks that democracy justifies anything? Vote to send people to the gas chambers and that's OK is it? This is why people don't want to let their children near people like you. What happens if someone doesn't want their children to know about recycling or whatever half-baked trendy idea some fart of a teacher has picked up in the pages of Socialist Worker? You couldn't have rational discussion of environmentalism in schools anyway because it's the new state religion and cannot be questioned. Why should your ideas take precedence anyway? What happens if the child isn't interested in evolution on the day you decide to teach it?

My only problem is that, even in schools, teaching to this standard is far from secure!

Genius! Let's try to stop the only alternative in town anyway!

In conclusion, I haven’t met a teacher yet who will deny the important role that family can play in a child’s learning. Also I don’t doubt, looking at the Swedish model as example, that there are better ways to organise education than what we currently have. Home schooling certainly has the potential to be one of these better ways - but how we talk about it is key.

"We" can talk about it all "we" like. Others just wish you'd shut up and let the rest of us get on with our own lives. But of course the Semples of this world will harass us without end because they're doing it for our own good.

Currently the State may be biased against home schooling - but there is no excuse for the near-hysterical reaction of home schoolers to a desire to regulate what they do. We need to find ways to open opportunities for child learning - at home or in school - and we need to do so knowing that this may be against the express wishes of the parents.

Understand this people. For those on the left they are not your children any more, they belong to the state. This is fascism, pure and simple. The man at the LEA knows better than you what is good for your children. David Semple is on a mission from Gordon and you are just going to have to learn your place.

This is at the core of my problem with home schooling; parents have replaced the absolute authority of the State with the absolute authority of themselves - and both need to be a lot more open to democratic regulation. This is reflected, to some extent, in the US figures below; of particular interest should be the 38% who are home schooled on religious grounds, and the 12% who object to what the school teaches.

Ignorant fascist again. Why quote the US figures? The UK ones are available and only 14% of UK home ed parents give religion as a reason. And regardless of that, what right do you have to demand that your views take preference? Choose liberalism and let people make their own minds up, or choose fascism and tell them what they must do.

Parents do have absolute authority because they are legally absolutely responsible. Get that through your cretinous teacher skull.

It highlights the hypocrisy at the heart of the home school movement and begs the question, since when are parents more qualified than teachers to choose what their children can and can’t learn?

Who gives a monkey's about the qualifications? The question is, who gets the better results and the answer is clear - home educating parents without degrees acheive better results for children than degree-educated teachers. Face it, you are working in an industry that does not do anyone any good. You are a waste of space and time. You are a parasite. Go and start doing something useful with your life and stop knackering other people's.

Whether boards of governors, LEAs or some body that will collectively represent home schoolers, this sort of regulation is the right of a democratic society - however we collectively decide to arrange it.

You can collectively naff off.

Labour's plans for the family

Sometimes it's peaceful:

In the brave new world of [Every Child Matters] parents are almost superfluous and completely interchangeable. They do feature on the pictoral explanation of a child's life, but they appear to have equal status to the 'third sector' and are placed further away from the child than:

• Maternity and Primary Health;
• Children's Centres;
• Extended Schools;
• Integrated Youth Services;
• Lead Professionals;
• Specialist Services;
• Multi-agency Locality Teams;
• The Team Around the Child;
• The Common Assessment Framework [opens pdf]; and
• ContactPoint.

Read the whole thing.

Terminological inexactitude

Libertarians of the left and of the right mean something entirely different when they talk about "liberty". This bodes rather ill for the Convention on Modern Liberty next week.

Click to read more ...

How others see us

Carol Gould at Pajamas Media:

Another glitch for Britain’s image in the world came on February 6 when television presenter Jeremy Clarkson, in an interview in Australia, referred to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a “one-eyed Scottish idiot.” The prime minister is visually impaired, is a Scot, and is believed by a large swathe of impoverished Britons to be an idiot, but the Clarkson gaffe made many feel that public decorum and the greatest of British attributes, graciousness, has evaporated.

A meeting with Sir John

So, here's the report on Sir John Houghton's lecture at St Andrews.

Sir John is a practising Christian and the lecture was part of a series on science and religion. It was filmed, and I understand that it should be available online in about a week's time at www.jamesgregory.org.

Sir John Houghton (it's pronounced 'Hawton', not 'Howton', I discovered) is a rather unprepossessing looking character. Not slick by any means. He dressed like a bureaucrat. I don't mean this as criticism - sartorial elegance isn't my strong point either - I just wanted to give an impression of the man. He has the darkest eyes I think I've ever seen. He is thinner than I remember him from pictures I've seen in the past. Older, more tired-looking.

The lecture was entitled "Global Warming - is it real and what should we do?". Unfortunately for expectant AGW science buffs, the lecture was mainly on the second bit, and I think this was a shame, because economics is not Sir John's specialism. It would have made more sense for him to speak on something he was actually expert in.

He started out with an admonition not to cheat on our children, our neighbours or 'the rest of creation'. For me, this didn't bode well for the rest of his talk. It's pretty clear that Sir John is a man with a mission. For him it's a moral thing, and he said as much in the lecture.

The scientific content was very thin. There was a graph (with a neatly truncated y-axis) of CO2 levels and an unsupported assertion that this leads to a change in climate. There was also a graph of projected temperature changes of between 2 and 6 degrees, extracted from AR4.

There was a lot of time spent on potential impacts - the European heatwave of a couple of years back (weather not climate, surely), sea level rises (photos of Bangladeshis swimming from floodwaters), more intense storms (these are apparently very noticeable), and droughts (photos of starving Africans. I found myself grinning at the nakedness of the propaganda. I hope he didn't notice.

My interest was reawakened rather when Sir John said he was going to discuss the uncertainties. However, I was quickly disabused of any hopes of a meaningful discussion because all we got was an argument from authority. The IPCC report he said, was the most thoroughly reviewed scientific document ever (or words to that effect). There was he said, a sustained misinformation campaign led by oil companies and the coal industry, which was intended to undermine them, but this attention had made the IPCC much better at their work. So much for the uncertainties.

Mark Lynas's book Six Degrees got a good plug. Sir John said even he found it quite scary in parts. (Ed: It's only a story, Sir John!)

Action to be taken included an end to deforestation, efficient energy generation and use, carbon capture, renewable energy (solar, tidal, wave, biomass (what, no nuclear?)).

Wealth has apparently come from fossil fuels (what, not trade?) and apparently we have to learn to SHARE (caps in original lecture). No political agenda there then.

I very much got the impression that on matters economic Sir John was well out of his depth. He said that the net cost of emissions reductions was zero. I found this a little surprising, to say the least. Sir John is however optimistic about global warming - because of the commitment of the scientific community, because the technology needed already exists and because of 'God's commitment to his creation'. Golly.

There was time for a few questions at the end. Sir John was not good here in my opinion. He waffled rather than giving precise answers.

He was pressed on his failure to mention nuclear power and he admitted that it was an option - one solution among many. On the subject of volcanos as a forcing he said that the impact was small compared to CO2.

He was accused (gently) of cherry-picking examples - he had mentioned warmth in Switzerland but not cold in China. He denied this, and said he needed examples which conveyed the message. The questioner also pointed out flat temperatures since 1998, but I don't remember if he addressed this point.

He was asked about very high levels of CO2 in the distant past (15% or more). Sir John said he is not a paleoclimate expert (didn't he give evidence to the Senate on the Hockey Stick?).

There was some discussion of overpopulation.

I had the final question and I decided to ask the topical question of whether a literature review such as is performed by the IPCC was adequate for questions of such huge import. He spent several minutes telling me that what they did was very thorough. He couldn't think of any other way of doing it, and unfortunately I couldn't get back in to say the word "replication", which I should have got into my question in the first place.

I very much came away with the impression of having listened to a piece of propaganda rather than a cogently presented scientific case, but it was not uninteresting for all that. While he is a perfectly acceptable speaker, this was not a persuasive case even for the undecided, I would say. The talk needed some vivid promotional graphic to help make the case. A hockey stick, say.

After the lecture, there was a chance to mill about in the foyer and have a glass of wine (which I avoided prior to the drive home) but I was able to spend quite a long time chatting to Sir John along with a group of other people. This was very pleasant and quite interesting. At the moment I'm not sure it is appropriate to report the contents of what probably counts as a private conversation, although there was nothing of earth-shattering importance said. If anyone can give me guidance on the jouralistic ethics of this situation, I would be interested: we were in the foyer of the auditorium and there was a constantly changing small crowd around Sir John asking questions.Thus some of what I heard was Sir John's replies to my questions, and some was his replies to other people. I don't know if this counts as public or private and reportable or not.

Sir John was very amiable and I got the impression that his views are quite sincerely held. He was quite forthcoming with his opinions and these were strongly stated (although not scandalously so), including particular disapproval of one sceptic he was asked about by one person there.

I've never met an FRS before, and I found myself rather disappointed that he didn't come across as cleverer. The sense of meeting a bureaucrat was overwhelming for me, although I admit I may have come with a predisposition to see him this way. My views on his knowledge of economics were reinforced though because when I pressed him on some of the points he had made during the lecture, he flannelled his way out of it.

I managed to get in a question about the hockey stick before he was dragged away to his meal with the bigwigs. Unfortunately he only had time to start his answer. Since his case has largely been stated before, I will risk reporting it here: the hockey stick was one graph among many and only gained prominence because of sceptical efforts. Paleoclimate has moved on. Nowadays some reconstructions show hockey sticks, some don't.

To his credit, Sir John was still trying to give me the rest of the answer as he was pulled away. Mind you if you were going to spend the evening supping with a bunch of divinity lecturers you might feel that there was a better time to be had debating hockey sticks.