Food security

Food security is a subject that's enjoyed a little splurge of interest in the last couple of days. The government's new science adviser, Professor John Beddington, is reported as saying that the food shortages are likely to affect us long before climate change.

This is interesting, because one of the main factors behind the increase in food prices has been the diversion of farming land to biofuels production, ostensibly as a contribution to the "fight against global warming". So here's a classic case of the cure being worse than the affliction. Thank-you, greens.

Of course, no government scientific adviser is allowed out in public without a genuflection before the global warming goddess, and Beddington is no exception. His comments include the obligatory reference to climate change which is (obviously) going to make things much worse. It always does, doesn't it?

Now, there is a bit of evidence that warming will reduce crop yields, but these claims are not generally accepted, not least because historically warming has lead to times of plenty while colder climate has lead to shortage. There is much more certainty over the fertilising effect of more CO2 in the atmosphere. With CO2 levels continuing to go up, and temperatures steady for the last ten years, we should actually be expecting higher yields. And that's before you factor in the impact of genetic modification which is now pretty widespread, outside backward places like Europe.

It's certainly true to say that crop yields have been rising dramatically in recent years, at least in the US:

If you look at the chart, it's clear that in the last fifty years yields have nearly quadrupled. Given that agriculture in much of the rest of the world is nowhere near this productive, there would appear to be enormous scope to increase production.

All we need to happen is for governments to stop interfering, to stop putting up barriers to trade, so that surpluses find their way to places of shortage, to stop the roll out of GM crops so that the benefits can be enjoyed by farmers and consumers everywhere, and for government chief scientists to stop playing the Cassandra and stick to the facts.  

A new logical fallacy?

Via In the Green, this quote from the Baltimore Sun on the subject of the recent global warming sceptics conference in New York.

How many scientists doubt global warming? It's looking like it could be about 20 -- compared to the more than 2,500 globally who have reached the conclusion that climate change is really happening. That's pretty strong evidence of a scientific consensus. "The meeting was largely framed around science, but after the luncheon, when an organizer made an announcement asking all of the scientists in the large hall to move to the front for a group picture, 19 men did so," 

This is clearly a nonsense. They are claiming that the sample is also the total of the population! I'm sure there must be a posh latin name for this fallacy, but having leafed through Madsen Pirie's "How to win every argument", I can't find it. Have I discovered a fallacy so daft that nobody has actually ever tried it before? Has the Baltimore Sun just plumbed a new depth in the annals of silliness?

We need to know. 

MEP's expenses

Tim Worstall points us to a summary of the EU auditor's report into MEP's expenses. This has been viewed in camera by a few people, but it's the first time any info beyond rumours of malfeasance have made it into the public arena. The rumours turn out to have been right.

The auditor has focused on payments to MEPs' staff.

[T]here is often no proportionality between the tasks performed and the remuneration received by a parliamentary assistant.

The audit report gives a number of examples to what situations this leads:
1. Payment of full allowance to a service provider with only one accredited assistant (1 case),
2. Payment of full allowance to a service provider with no accredited assistants (2 cases),
3. Payment of allowance to a company with no activity shown in annual accounts (1 case),
4. Payment of allowance to service provider with irrelevant activities (2 cases).

In the first case the service provider's area of business was the provision of child care. In the second case, the business appeared to be the trading of wood.

We can be quite sure that the beneficiaries of all this activity are the MEPs' friends and family. How so? Because they have said there's nothing they can do about it:

The Parliament Administration said in reply to the auditor that retroactive correction and clarification was not possible as a legal basis was lacking in the rules.

And there's more: the auditor has also looked at redundancy handouts to assistants of MEPs who were not re-elected. Of his sample of 42:

• Ten of these payments were made in breach of the PEAM rules as they continued to be under contract of an MEP who was still in office.
• One assistant received during the lay-off period of 3 months an accumulated monthly salary of [EUR]8,890. He accumulated lay-off payments from 5 MEPs, continuing payments from 3 re-elected MEPs and payments from 4 newly elected MEPs, thus receiving at the same time part-time payments from 12 (former) MEPs during three months.
• In two other cases the MEPs raised the salary oftwo assistants with 71% and 117% duringthe lay-off period, in order to exhaust the balance available.
  

The sheer corruption of the political class is almost unimaginable. Labour, Conservative, LibDem. You can see why they keep voting for "ever-closer union" - it's the opportunity it gives them for "ever-greater graft".

The original report is here.

Update:

If you think I'm wrong about this, MEPs have voted not to publish their expenses. 

Terminating the contract.

Richard North of EU Referendum fame may know as much about the EU as anyone alive, so his thoughts on Parliament's refusal to ask the people about the Lisbon treaty are worth noting. He also has something to say about where we go from here.

[T]he effect of what they have done is to destroy the contract between us, the people and our representatives. By this contract they rule us, with our consent.

That consent has now been withdrawn. This is no longer our parliament. In any meaningful sense, it is no longer a parliament. Be done with it.

Read the whole thing. 

Referendum or not

There's a lot of tit-for-tat politicking going on at the moment over who wanted a referendum and who didn't and when and why. The Conservatives were against a referendum on Maastricht (but it wasn't in their manifesto then, so that was OK apparently). Labour and the LibDems said that they wanted one on the constitution in their manifestos but the cover of the Lisbon Treaty is blue, and the Constitution one is red, so it's OK, OK? And the LibDems say they're calling for a referendum on whether we should make water flow uphill instead - they promised a referendum and they're fighting to give it to you!

Thank-you all.

When should we get a referendum?

It's fair to say that there is no default right to a referendum, which undermines the way things are done in the UK. We're a representive democracy after all. Many argue, however, that parliament should refer to the people over fundamental constitutional issues, although it's clear that this was not done for Maastricht or say for Scottish devolution.

I would argue that when an issue is (a) constitutional, and (b) related to the EU, then it is necessary to put the matter to a referendum. Why do I think only EU matters should be treated in this way? The reason is that the single fundamental fact of the English Constitution is that no parliament may bind its successors.  But the succession of EU treaties tying us closer and closer to the EU have had the effect of doing just that. If Lisbon is ratified tonight, it is not possible for a future parliament to unratify it. It has to unratify all the other EU treaties as well. The effect is to limit future parliaments to a choice of "all or nothing". Whichever way you look at it, this is still binding them.

The ropes may only be tied around Britannia's feet, but she is still bound.

Blogger accused of having blood on his hands

John Adams is probably better described as an expert on risk than as a blogger, but we'll let that pass. A commenter has accused him of being complicit in the death of a driver in New Zealand. The driver was not wearing a seatbelt when killed, an offence he'd been convicted for many times previously, and the commenter reckons Adams is to blame because of his stated views on seatbelts. (OK, so the guy was also high on drugs too, but....)

I'm reading Adams' book "Risk" at the moment, and I find his arguments quite convincing. In essence he says that if you wear a seatbelt, you are probably going to driver more recklessly than if you aren't. So while a seatbelt reduces the risk of injury if you're in a crash, it also makes you more likely to have a crash in the first place.

This is perhaps all a bit subtle for the commenter in question who reckons that Prof Adams has been campaigning for people not to wear seatbelts. If he (the commenter) was consistent he would also be cheering Adams' "campaign" every time a pedestrian was knocked over and killed: if people weren't wearing seatbelts, they'd never drive so fast.

Olympic security

According to an article in the Times, builders working on the Olympic site in London are going to have to pass through stringent security checks, just to get in:

About 100,000 workers at the Olympics site in London are to be screened using advanced face and palm recognition techniques in one of the largest and most expensive security operations undertaken on a British construction project.

I just wonder if anyone in government asked the suppliers to guarantee that all this equipment still works when the hands and faces being scanned are covered in concrete. 

Ellee Seymour

Ellee Seymour has a post up about issuing firearms certificates to children.

A Freedom of Information request found that an 11-year-old has been given a shotgun licence by police already this year, while in 2006 a 10-year-old was handed one. In the past five years, 182 under-16s have received shotgun licences from Suffolk police which are valid for five years.

Ellee comes across as a nice person, but with the traditional politician's love of banning things. She'll feel right at home if she gets elected next time roung. Clearly, children using shotguns is a major problem if people aren't even aware that it's happening. As Mr Free Market says in the comments

Every time I see the hysteria whipped up in the sensationalist gun fearing press about youngsters & air weapons (or firearms), my Boy gets sent out into the farm yard to shoot rats because out here, vermin control has always been a youngsters job.

Since he has been physically large enough to lift a weapon, he has been taught & is continuing to be taught, all aspects of handling, marksmanship & safety.

And that's the point, isn't it? Children have been shooting vermin on farmyards since time immemorial. I'm sure the kids love it and it's a job that needs to be done. What better way of introducing a young person to the real world?

I wonder if Ellee thinks the boy would be better off hanging round on street corners?  

Just how far are their snouts in the trough?

A thought occurred to me the other day. If MPs are using their expenses to pad out their paltry sixty grand salaries, then it might be possible to see this by analysing the expenses figures and looking at how they correlate with other data. My first idea was that there should be some correlation between the travel expenses and the distance from the MPs' constituencies to Westminster.

The House of Commons Expenses data for 2006-7 is here. As is normal with sensitive data like this, it is provided in a format carefully chosen to make analysis as difficult as possible. However, with a trial copy of Adobe Acrobat, and a bit of jiggery pokery in Excel I've managed to get what I think is a clean set of data. I've removed from it those people who are no longer MPs - including Tony Blair.

Having eyeballed the data, the travel expenses didn't actually look as if they were going to throw up anything nefarious. Because of this, and because the staff costs were so much higher, I decided to analyse these instead.

My hypothesis was this: if MPs are employing lots of staff, their office costs should be inflated too, to reflect all the work done by the staff. I therefore prepared a scatter plot of office costs (columns 3, 7, 7a and 8 on the PDF file) against staffing costs (column 4). Here it is:

 

I've asked Excel to calculate a linear trendline, which you can see on the graph. And if you were in any doubt as to how good a correlation there is between staff costs and office expenses, the answer is that there is none. Literally. (For those who aren't statisticians, the R² value of 1E-5 which is to say, near as dammit zero, is the figure which tells you whether there's a correlation or not. A value of near to 1 is a strong correlation. Zero means there is none.)

Which strongly suggests that quite a lot of our elected representatives are on the fiddle.

(If anyone wants the data, you can download it by clicking here). 

Changing attitudes

Lord Mancroft's outburst about the nurses in Bath is the subject of a posting over at Liberal Conspiracy. Alix Mortimer reckons the nursing profession is up in arms about Mancroft's remarks. Strangely though, this outrage is not reflected in the blogosphere, with the vast majority of postings collected on Technorati being broadly supportive of the peer's position.

What changed times we live in when a slack-jawed Tory peer can criticise the angels of the nursing profession and be cheered for doing it.

These are the postings: for, against, and undeclared. 

For Lord Mancroft (11)

Tony Sharp
Mental nurse
Tangled Web
Dr Grumble
Random Thoughts
Conservative Home
England Expects
Dr Grumble
Bishop Hill
Ben Brogan
Jammie Wearing Fool 

Against Lord Mancroft (5)

Piqued
Prison Law Inside Out
Hot Ginger & Dynamite
Curly's Cornershop
Byrne Baby Byrne 

On the fence (5)

Suzanne Lamido
Dr Rant
NHS Blog Doc 

More on sleaze

It looks very much like Cash for Conways was not an isolated incident.

The Telegraph is reporting that more than fifty MPs have laid off staff since our Derek was sent down. Meanwhile, Guido has noted that most of Labour MP Tom Watson's family seem to be suckling on the public teat. Watson pays his wife as an assistant, but it's even better than that:

Like her husband, [Mrs Watson] also works for [Euro MP Michael] Cashman and for Wolverhampton Labour MP Pat McFadden, yet still finds time to be a Labour councillor in Sandwell.

And the political classes are rushing to destroy the evidence. According to the Telegraph article, it was alleged yesterday that Speaker Michael Martin has permitted the shredding of MPs expense claims prior to 2005. 

As these expense claims form part of the MPs' remuneration, isn't this illegal? 

Abolition of income tax

Well, nothing like arriving with a bang.

The UK Libertarian party has issued its first policy - the abolition of income tax.

It's radical, and I fear it will allow opponents to portray the party as lunatics, but who knows, maybe people are ready for something radical?

Tesco good, M&S bad

M&S have said they're going to selflessly charge us for plastic bags. Tesco have said they're not.

When I want my supermarket to make ethical decisions for me, I'll ask them to do so. In the meantime, I choose Tesco.

Good news

There's good news today, with the government's announcement that it's going to build twenty new university campuses around the UK.  You've got to hand it to Labour, they know what's worrying us middle class parents. With a campus on every street corner, a university education will become a ticket to a lifetime on the tills at McDonalds.

Which means I'm not going to have to pay for three kids to get a university education. I can retire after all! 

Decision day

So, it's decision day for parents today. The day when thousands of worried mums and dads find out if they've got their children into their preferred school. The day when the hopes of many are dashed. The day when careers are remapped, and expectations for the future are downgraded in the light of decisions to go private or home-ed.

The educational establishment meanwhile has got its retaliation in first, with a press release:

School leaders are calling on politicians to end what they call "the misleading rhetoric" of school choice - which, they say, cannot be delivered.

and there's a strong hint that it's not just the rhetoric they want to see the back of:

The admissions regulator, chief schools adjudicator Philip Hunter, has said that the present system of admissions and "parental choice" is fuelling social and racial divisions.

He has said that options that will be unpopular with many parents, such as having local lotteries for places, might be necessary.

It's probably true that school choice can't be delivered at the moment, but this is mainly because of all the silly rules which the government has set up. My children's school, which is about five miles away, is very rural and struggles to keep numbers up, although it's generally held to be very good.  Last year it lost a teacher because of the falling roll and one of the classes is now a composite of two years' intake.

Meanwhile the school in the village where I live is again very good, but has had a surge in numbers. It is now hugely overcrowded, with classes held in corridors and cloakrooms.

In a sane world, parents from an overcrowded school would be offered places at the non-overcrowded one. But an absurd rule stops this from happening. To take the overflow, the school with space would need to take on a teacher, to replace the one it lost last time round. The rules say they can't do this. They can only offer out-of-catchment places up to their existing staffing levels.

I just can't imagine the levels of stupidity that would be required to think that a rule like this was a good idea.