Wait for it...

Carlotta wonders about the impact of the Birmingham starved child case on home education. Word has started to get around that the poor child had been taken out of school ten weeks ago following a campaign of bullying. I heard the family's MP on the radio this morning saying that parents weren't allowed to take their children out of school in this way. This will have been a surprise to the thousands of families who have done just that, and demonstrates once again the traditional talent of MPs to sound off at considerable length on subjects about which they are entirely ignorant - the law is quite clear that if you want to educate your children yourself, you can.

Since the news broke, there has been some relief for home educators with the news that the family had received a visit from the local authority home-ed inspectors, who had noted nothing out of the ordinary. This rather undermines the arguments, which are surely coming soon, that home educators should be obliged to accept regular inspections from local authorities to ensure that they're not abusing their kids - at the moment they are free to tell the local authority to take a running jump. People will say that in order to avoid tragedies like this there is no alternative to change. "It's for the children!", will be the refrain - an arugment that, for most people in the UK, seems to trump all others .

Let's hope that the political tide of change that seems to be strengthening at the moment, brings with it a realisation that civil liberties are just a bit too important to be thrown away on irrational, emotional argument like this. The idea that you cannot live your life with your family, without officers of the state coming to check that you haven't committed some heinous crime against them, is dangerous and is frankly untenable in a free society.

If we are still a free society, that is. 

Sensitittivy training

Is that how you spell it? (via Donald Clark) 

Who goes unarmed these days?

The Graun says that a third of young people living in cities thinks it's acceptable to carry a knife for self-defence.

One in three young people living in cities thinks it is acceptable to carry a knife in self-defence because violence is so rife, according to research revealed today. Teenagers and twenty-somethings have lost faith in politicians, the police or schools to protect them and increasingly believe they need to be armed to defend themselves against people of their own age. Nearly half said they knew someone who had been a victim of knife crime.

And with depressing predictability they wheel out the old fallacy about carrying a knife making you more at risk of being a victim of crime - it's far more likely that people at risk of being a victim of crime decide to arm themselves with knives, which is the point of the article in the first place. 

It's odd to think that we seem to be approaching the situation where criminals go armed and chidren go armed but law-abiding adults don't. Isn't this the wrong way round?   

Very cool add in for Firefox

I've just got myself a very cool add-in for Firefox called Hyperwords. This is what I've been looking for for ages. Select a bit of text and you get a pop-up menu which will take you anywhere on the internet you want to go - Wikipedia, search engines, shops, Technorati, you name it. Select a number and you can do currency conversions on it, you can tag things in delicious.

The menus are configurable, so you only get the functionality you want, and there's all sorts of clever tailoring you can do as well. 

Well worth a look for Firefox users. 

Lord Lawson on Five Live

Nigel Lawson is on the Simon Mayo show on Radio Five today at 2pm, discussing his new book on global warming.

Keep on knocking

Ok, so the BBC won't let me see the emails. Information held for journalistic purposes is exempt, it seems.

This isn't the end of the world though, because all I want is some confirmation that there were some emails, and if there were, when they arrived at the BBC.

I've gone back to the Beeb and asked if I can see the dates and times of email correspondence between Roger Harrabin and the WMO.  Surely the dates and times of the emails isn't information held for journalistic purposes.

Ambassadors ain't what they used to be

According to my researches on the interweb, the young lady in the photo above is called Divya Dwivedi.

Further research reveals that Divya Dwivedi was appointed by Ken Livingstone to be London's representative in Delhi! Strewth! I imagine the good people of Delhi will be pretty pleased with that particular appointment! Certainly, from the pic above, the ambassador's cocktail parties look like a lot of fun.

Says Ms Dwivedi of her appointment:

This is an exciting new challenge for me and I keenly look forward to representing the Mayor of London’s Office in India. I am firmly convinced about the opportunity that lies ahead of me to function as a keystone in bridging opportunities between London and India. In this position, I hope to successfully promote brand London and develop a mutually beneficial relationship between India and London.

Mutually beneficial relationships appear to be a speciality for Ms D. And she certainly seems to have "got into the swing" of her new job, as we learn from this article that she's going to be appearing naked in a Hollywood movie, something that will presumably create "lots of bridging opportunities". One can only applaud her dedication to the job.

Do you know, I suddenly realise why Boris and the Conservatives have made a U-turn on doing away with the London "embassies". 

Here's another photo of Ms D, this time with Ken himself. She looks kind of different in this picture...

 

BBC says Harrabin emails stay secret

The BBC have now responded to my request to see the email exchange which Roger Harrabin claims took place between himself and the World Meteorological Organisation at the time of the Jo Abbess "change the report or else" story.

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that the Beeb is refusing to release the emails.

At the end of the day then, we have the word of one man, Roger Harrabin that the email exchange took place and what its contents were.

If he were a blogger, we would not accept this lack of any evidence. If you don't present evidence, the blogosphere isn't going to take your word for it.

This same principle applies to the BBC too. But more so. 

The madness of King Gordon

I've commented a couple of times on how the Labour party just doesn't seem to understand why it has become so unpopular, as demonstrated by their failure to come up with any sensible suggestions for new policies to regain the initiative.

There's no suggestion that the higher echelons of the government have twigged the problem yet either. Take a look at this article from the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group, which is a pretty clear example of the madness which has become the stock in trade of Labour government. It tells the story of a hypothetical French student called Henri who studies in the UK and works at home in his summer holidays. Having a bit of cash to spare at the end of his hols, he buys himself a pair of new trainers to impress Les Anglaises.

At this point, Gordon Brown, or more to the point, his tax policy on non-doms steps in:

The new Finance Bill proposes that if Henri lands at Dover wearing his new trainers, he should declare that fact to HMRC and be charged to tax on their cost.

We should also add that if Henri needs to buy some books to study in the UK and uses his French debit card to buy them, he will also have to declare that to HMRC and potentially pay tax on those as well.

These are what are known in tax law as “remittances”.

Henri could declare all his income (including his earnings in France) like a UK student and avoid the charge on remittances, but that would mean completing a Self-assessment tax return, reading around 100 pages of HMRC material about double taxation agreements and residence, as well as corresponding with the French tax authorities.

Whatever he does, he is in a fix. Henri may not pay any UK tax at the end of the day; but he will probably have to spend half the year studying tax law in order to satisfy the requirements of HMRC.

If you spend six months finding out how to pay your taxes and the rest of the year earning enough money to pay them, you wonder why anyone gets out of bed at all. But these are the facts of life in Brown's Britain.

Outed!

It's happened. I've been outed. The awful truth has finally seen the light of day.

Yes, it's true. I'm a LABOUR supporter.

Or at least according to Labour councillor for Lambeth, Christopher Wellbelove, I am. According to his dinky "Inside Social Media and Search" site, I am one of the "Labour supporters who blog". Where on earth did he get that idea from?

Christopher apparently works in search engine optimisation at BT.  I hope he didn't use any of his patent search techniques in researching my political persuasion.   

Time's up!

Twenty working days have now elapsed since I put in my FoI request asking for the email correspondence between the BBC's Roger Harrabin and the WMO. Twenty days is the maximum time period that they say the request should take to process. It goes without saying that I've had no word from the BBC since their acknowledgement of the receipt of the request.

Time to start digging again.... 

Gordon Ramsay says "Africans are expendable"

Quite why the BBC thinks the opinions of a footballer-turned-cook are of any great interest is beyond me, but they are reporting today that Mr Ramsay wants to ban out of season produce from restaurants. And he has been telling Gordon Brown so as well.

I'm probably becoming a bit of a stuck record on this subject, but it's hard to know what else to do in the face of a never-ending barrage of demands to ban imported food.

So here we go again. If we ban out of season food then people in Africa and Chile are going to be out of jobs and that may well mean starving.

Just because you can't see them Gordon, doesn't mean they can be flung on the scrapheap without a second thought.

Richard Murphy

Tim W's favourite accountant, Richard Murphy, wonders what the fuss is about Aberdeen Asset Management's rumoured departure from these shores.

Guess what? Here we have another company threatening to leave the UK that is not only not paying UK tax in 2007, it’s such a seasoned UK tax avoider that it’s downgraded its previously stated UK tax liabilities by £7.8 billion in two years.

Michael Meacher refers to our Dicky as one of the UK's foremost tax experts. Its a pity then that Mr Murphy has such trouble telling the difference between millions and billions. This is probably the same affliction from which Gordon Brown suffers.

Richard's argument is a bit dicky too (it always is). Why should their 2007 tax bill be the criterion used? What happened in 2006? Well, the comparative figures show that last time round they had a tax charge of nearly ten million and, adjustments aside, that's not an inconsiderable sum. And never mind the charge - what did they actually hand over in cash in 2007? The answer, according to the cashflow statement, is £9.7m and the year before that £6.7m.

So in simple cash terms, a company which has handed over £16.4m in cash in the last two years is, according to our Dicky, "contributing little or nothing".

You can see why they'd want to leave, can't you?

Will Labour do something stupid?

The news that the Tories are now enjoying a 26% poll lead over the government has got them rattled over at Labour Home. There is still not the slightest sign that anyone among the readership has the slightest idea about why people have turned against them. (Hint: it's the economy, stupid.)

The latest lot of solutions from the red corner are no better than the last lot either. A core vote strategy is today's bright idea with radical redistribution mooted by one commenter on the thread. 

The issue of having "tax and spend" as your solution to all known problems can be tricky when you are in a tight corner caused by too much taxing and too much spending.  Unfortunately, I don't think anyone in the Labour party has the sharpness of mind to work out how to solve this conundrum.

Figure fiddling

The British Crime Survey is widely held to be the most reliable representation of the incidence of crime in this country. It's all relative though. Think tankers Civitas have just put out a press release which says that the BCS might be leaving three million crimes per year out of the figures. Probably par for the course for government statistics.

It reveals that, ever since its inception in 1981, the British Crime Survey (BCS) has omitted many crimes committed against people who have been repeat victims. If people are victimised in the same way by the same perpetrators more than five times in a year, the number of crimes is put down as five. The justification for this was ‘to avoid extreme cases distorting the rates’, but, as Farrell and Pease point out, ‘if the people who say they suffered ten incidents really did, it is capping the series at five that distorts the rate’.

So please remember people. Once you've been mugged five times, don't even bother telling the police, cause they'll just throw the report in the bin.