Eye on Britain (2)

jonjayray — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:56:15 +0000

NHS ‘in peril’ if health reforms fail, warn senior GPs

The NHS will be ‘in peril’ if the Government’s controversial health reforms are prevented from going ahead, a group of senior GPs have warned.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, the heads of more than 50 new doctors’ groups argue that the British Medical Association’s policy of “blanket opposition” to the Health and Social Care Bill fails to represent GPs’ views.

They warn that previous reforms have not gone far enough and have consequently “paid the price of disengaging the frontline staff most needed to modernise the NHS”.

They argue: “We cannot allow that to happen this time. Without strong clinical leadership and the co-ordinated efforts of local clinicians the NHS itself may be in peril: local services can only be improved if we all pull together.”

The letter has been signed by 56 GPs who are helping set up clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) across England. Under the Bill these will effectively replace primary care trusts (PCTs) and be handed their budgets.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, has consistently argued that the central thrust of the Bill is to give doctors a greater say, and key to this is giving them more responsibility for commissioning health services.

However, many believe the real motive is to open up the NHS for greater private sector involvement.

Last November the BMA moved to a position of total opposition to the Bill, and since the New Year the Royal College of Nurses and the Royal College of Midwives have followed suit. The Royal College of GPs is deeply sceptical, although not yet publicly in total opposition.

However, some BMA members are deeply unhappy at its stance, which is reflected in the letter.

It notes: “Blanket opposition to the NHS reforms by the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nurses is not representative of the views of GPs who, like us, already lead CCGs, and the large numbers of GPs and nurses who support us.”

The letter was organised by the NHS Alliance, which describes itself as “an independent non-political organisation proud to be at the forefront of clinically-led commissioning”.

Dr Shane Gordon, chief executive of North East Essex CCG, who helped draft the letter, said: “The BMA and RCN have strong and respected voices within the profession, but a range of views is vital to a rounded discussion.

“As leaders of CCGs, who have already tried and tested some of the principles of the NHS reforms, we are united in our view that clinical leadership of commissioning is essential to the future of the NHS.”

Dr Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s GPs Committee, said if the reforms were just about commissioning “the BMA would be in favour”.

But he added: “However, they are not; the wider reform agenda will make the improvements these CCG leads, quite rightly, want to make to patient care, harder rather than easier to achieve.”

Dr Clare Gerada, chair of the RCGPs, said: “GPs must understand their role in commissioning and we support the principle of greater clinician involvement.

“But many of our members feel that this could have been done in a less disruptive way by placing GPs on the boards of existing PCTs.”

Most GPs would struggle to find the time to “play a major part” in commissioning, she added, while the Bill “also brings an emphasis on competition and the removal of Governmental responsibility, which we feel will result in an adverse effect on quality of care and patient safety”.

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The Leftist gospel constantly preached in the schools and elsewhere (“There is no such thing as right and wrong”) bears fruit

The other morning I woke to find a voicemail message on my mobile phone, beginning with the words: ‘This is the police station at Charing Cross. As it turned out, the message was to inform me that some honest soul had handed in my sister’s wallet, which she had dropped at Embankment Underground station on her way to her early shift at the BBC World Service that morning.

The police had looked diligently through her business cards, finding mine among them, and since my surname matched the one on Catherine’s credit cards, they guessed rightly that I would know how to get in touch with her.

My faith in human nature was instantly restored, and I felt a stab of guilt at having suspected our blameless boys of having got into trouble.

All the parties concerned had come out of the incident well — from the kind stranger, probably on his way to work, who had gone to the trouble of handing the wallet in, to the police who took such care to see it returned to its rightful owner.

As the cynics (or realists) among you may guess, there’s a depressing sequel to this story. But I’ll keep that until the end.

For now, I’ll just say that after my initial amazement that someone in central London had been honest enough to hand in a bulging wallet, I began to wonder why I should really have been surprised at all. After all, I know that if I found somebody’s wallet, I would certainly take it to the nearest police station.

I would have done so even before my own was stolen by a sharp-suited pickpocket in Rome this summer — when it came home to me what a devastating loss a wallet can be in this high-tech age, when our whole lives are encoded in electronic strips on plastic cards.

What’s more, I’d be 100 per cent happy to bet the entire contents of my new one — restocked with cash and plastic after days spent cancelling and reapplying for everything — that the enormous majority of people reading this article would do the same good turn for their fellow man, without so much as a passing thought to pocketing his property. (Well, perhaps just a nanosecond’s thought before our innate honesty kicked in.)

But it seems that we’re in a shrinking minority, you and I. For a disturbing report from the newly established Centre for the Study of Integrity at Essex University finds that honesty is going out of fashion in modern Britain, as increasing numbers of our fellow subjects think it acceptable to lie and cheat.

In my book, the two most striking findings of the survey are that the under-25s are twice as likely to condone dishonesty as the over-65s — and that while women are slightly more honest than men, integrity in both sexes bears no relation to social class, education or income.

I hope I’m not being too hard on my sons’ middle-class friends when I say that neither discovery surprises me in the least (while the second one should explode once and for all the patronising libel that the poor are more likely to be dishonest than the better off).

To illustrate what I mean, I remember one occasion when several of one of my son’s teenage friends came round to take him off to town for a party. I asked my boy if he had enough money for his train fare and one of his friends told me: ‘It’s OK. They leave the station gates open at this time of night and there’s never anyone around to check.’ He said this in a matter-of-fact way, to a stuffy middle-aged man he hardly knew, as if he was just passing on a helpful tip.

It didn’t seem to occur to him that he was proposing that my son should join him and the others in committing the crime of defrauding the Southern Railway Company of about £25. Or if it did, it simply didn’t occur to him that this was wrong. As far as he was concerned, it was a morally neutral matter — and if there was no chance of getting caught, it would be downright silly to pay.

It’s the same with internet piracy. God knows how many people are at it, each carrying around stolen albums worth hundreds or even thousands of pounds on their iPhones.

To them, it’s a victimless crime — and no doubt countless teenagers will tell you, with a look of insufferable piety, that they support Wikipedia’s protest against U.S. plans to crack down on ‘free information’.

But to those of us, musicians and others, who rely on our intellectual property to feed our families, it doesn’t feel victimless at all. Heaven knows, however, it’s not only the young who seem increasingly unable to spot the difference between right and wrong, between behaving with integrity and not-getting-caught.

Think of the legions of Incapacity Benefit claimants who are miraculously cured as soon as the summons to a medical check drops on to the doormat. Or the swelling numbers of motorists, encouraged by shyster lawyers, who claim for undetectable whiplash injuries after minor car crashes — so pushing up premiums for the rest of us.

As for why the nation seems to be losing its moral compass, I imagine the decline of religion — and with it, the fear of eternal damnation — must have something to do with it. So, too, must the increasing leniency of earthly punishments for dishonesty.

But shouldn’t we also lay much of the blame for its spread on the collapse of integrity in public life? I’m thinking, of course, of the orgy of larceny that was the MPs’ expenses scandal.

I’m thinking, too, of the vast rewards reaped by unpunished bankers for parcelling up bad debts and selling them on to the unsuspecting.

And I’m thinking of the endless lies — from the monstrous whoppers told by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell when they took us to war against Iraq, to the knee-jerk fibs told by so many MPs, whose first instinct when they find themselves in a hole is to try to lie their way out of it.

But I’m in danger of sounding hideously priggish. Like most of us, I’ve told many a lie in my time, ranging from the white (‘I absolutely love the jumper you gave me’), to the off-white nod to the boss suggesting that, yes, I paid close attention to the Foreign Secretary’s interview on the Today programme this morning.

To be honest, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even bother to hand in a sum of less than £20 if I saw it lying the street. I’d probably just leave it there — and let someone else wrestle with his conscience. But a wallet …. now, that’s different.

Which brings me at last to the sequel to my sister’s tale. When she lost her wallet at Embankment station, it contained just over £40 cash. When she collected it from the police station — you guessed it — the money had gone. I told you it was depressing.

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Why I let my son dress like a girl for five years…and why for his sake I put a stop to it

By Lorraine Candy (Editor-in-chief of British Elle magazine)

As a toddler, my son Henry used to sleep in a nightie, after I gave up on trying to wrestle him into pyjamas. Later, he took to calling himself Stephanie, Jean, Olive or, most frequently, Miss Argentina.

His favourite game was wearing his elder sisters’ sequin party dresses while running his imaginary boutique ‘Slinx’ or greeting customers in his hairdressing salon ‘Slapchicks’ (God knows where he got that name from).

Once, aged three, his penchant for dressing as a girl even landed us in A&E, where a patient doctor had to remove Barbie’s earring from inside Henry’s ear canal. ‘Which one is it?’ asked the doctor, meaning which ear. ‘The pink one with gold round the outside,’ he replied.

Visitors to our house assumed I had three girls because he rarely wore boys’ clothing at home. He said he preferred to wear something ‘more comfortable’: dresses, skirts, tights or princess costumes.

At first I let him get on with it, because it seemed to make him happy. My husband rolled his eyes at the sight of his chubby, short-haired boy squeezed into a tutu. ‘He’s just in touch with his feminine side,’ I told him.

But essentially we were in agreement —‘banning’ anything in the early years is the route to rebellion later. So we let him dress as he pleased, and indulge his ‘feminine’ side.

And his love of all things girly started to colour other aspects of Henry’s life too. He refused to go to football club because he didn’t like the uniforms, despite my explanation that even the girls wore the club’s outfit. ‘Shorts are for boys,’ he would protest.

You may assume, from all this, that I’d be in favour of what has been termed ‘gender neutral parenting’ — raising a child as neither boy nor girl, but giving it free rein to express itself in whatever way he or she chooses.

That was the approach taken by Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper. They’re the couple who made headlines last week for raising their five-year-old son, Sasha, as ‘gender neutral’. Like me, they allowed their little boy to dress in girls’ clothes and play with girls’ toys.

But unlike me, it seems Sasha’s parents’ ‘experiment’ formed part of their wider ideology, using it to examine whether ‘boy/girl’ stereotyping could be bypassed altogether.

I know, from my own experience, that some children do not conform to the conventional behaviour expected of their gender anyway. But I know also that there came a time when I had to put a stop to my boy’s ‘girlish’ instincts. I knew it was my duty as a parent to make it stop — for reasons I will come to later.
Little angel? Unlike Lorraine’s son, five-year-old Sasha is being raised as ‘gender neutral’

Little angel? Unlike Lorraine’s son, five-year-old Sasha is being raised as ‘gender neutral’

So where had my Henry’s love of girls’ clothes come from? To start with, my husband and I found it hard to understand. I turned to parenting books, they indicated that it was probably because Henry worshipped his two older sisters (now aged eight and nine) and wanted to be ‘in their club’.

Apparently, all children need to ‘belong’; they crave positive recognition as they develop between the ages of three and seven. They seek the approval of their peer group to make them feel secure so they can develop with confidence.

Before he started school, Henry’s sisters were his peer group. Dressing like them was his way into their world, where he felt safe. They wore nighties, so he wanted one too.

When he was a toddler, this was fine. Other toddlers pay no heed to what fellow miniatures wear. But older children do. When Henry was four, I noticed that the older children of some of my friends would laugh at his feminine attire.

I couldn’t bear to watch him run off red-faced to change. Of course, he didn’t fully understand why people laughed at him. But I did. And I began realise how, as he grew older, his cross-dressing would become a habit which enabled others to hurt him. I had to stop that happening.

My husband and I decided to wait until Henry’s fifth birthday in November to break the news to him that there would be no more sequins, no more Slapchicks or Miss Argentina. We tried building up to it gently, mentioning it every now and then so he would know what was coming.

Then one night last November, we packed away his nightie and the dresses for good. ‘From now on, you need to wear boys’ clothes and sleep in boys’ pyjamas,’ I told him.

He was mildly upset but not unduly worried. He didn’t fully understand why he could no longer dress in the clothes he loved, but since starting school in September, he had become more aware of the difference between boys and girls anyway.

‘Can I still do it on special occasions?’ he asked. We said he could — but he hasn’t asked since.

The fact he had a new baby sister helped. ‘These are Mabel’s things now,’ we told him.

Actually, it was me who grieved most. I was sad to say goodbye to the alter ego he’d created (and accessorised so stylishly) with such joy. I think my husband was relieved — and Henry’s two older sisters were pleased that he’d stop ferreting through their jewellery boxes.

Some may see my decision as pandering to convention. But I didn’t make this decision because I was scared of what the future holds for a boy happy in his feminine skin or because I believe cross-dressing is wrong. Remember, I work in fashion.

No, I made this decision because although I truly wish fashion’s liberal and inclusive attitude extended to all other industries, it just doesn’t. Allowing my son to continue down his feminine path would only incur ridicule and hurt.
A video of Sasha Laxton talking about how ‘silly’ it is to have girls’ and boys’ colours was put on You Tube by his mother

A video of Sasha Laxton talking about how ‘silly’ it is to have girls’ and boys’ colours was put on You Tube by his mother

This is what confuses me about parents like Sasha’s. He has been hailed as an experiment in breaking stereotypes, but who would want to expose their child to possible derision for the sake of their political beliefs?

Yet, they are by no means alone. Last year, the US parents of a five-year-old boy called Dyson wrote a book called My Princess Boy and appeared on live TV with him in a ballet outfit.

He was to be the poster boy for a radical change in gender thinking, they said — as he sat there supremely uninterested in the discussion. Meanwhile in Canada, another five-year-old called Storm is being raised gender neutral. In Sweden they have two-year-old Pop, while one Swedish nursery has instigated a ‘gender neutral’ policy referring to the children as ‘friends’ rather than him or her.

Of course, a more open-minded attitude to gender can be a positive thing — whether in childhood, to counteract Disney’s ridiculous glorification of Cinderella (a world where blondes are good, brunettes are bad and falling in love makes everything better), or in adulthood, to help challenge the ‘gender gap’ between male and female rates of pay in the workplace.

I would happily ban all those wretched pink-frilled dolls that fill the shelves of supermarkets across the land, mini ironing boards and kitchen utensils (who wants to be a indoctrinated into domestic drudgery that early, boy or girl?).

Perhaps if there were gender- neutral schools in every borough then Sasha, Dyson, Storm and Pop would be welcome trailblazers for a new way of thinking. But in the real world, schools separate boys and girls for many sensible reasons.

It’s a huge responsibility for children as young as five to be expected to change this thinking. And a little arrogant of parents, who don’t work in the field of child care or child psychology to assume they can do this through a lone child.

But perhaps the most important point is that many of these attempts to unburden children from the constraints of gender are misguided. Dressing up is what pre-schoolers do. You may think your toddler is striking a blow for feminism or his future right to wear women’s clothing in public but he’s not — he’s just playing a game.

You may think you are giving him the rare freedom of ignoring society’s expectations of his gender but actually he’s just thinking: ‘Whoa, sequins! They look cool’.

No child expert has advocated this as a resolution to gender stereotyping and its consequent inequalities. While they say it’s unlikely to be damaging (as long as the child is not forced to dress a certain way), it probably won’t have the effect these parents desire either.

But we should also remember that in today’s world of rapid, global information, these images of Sasha and all those YouTube videos of Dyson will live for some time. They’ll be there for all to see whether these boys like it or not. They have had no choice in the matter — is that really fair?

Wouldn’t it be better for parents to encourage schools and nurseries to talk more about gender and how it affects their charges as they grow rather than to put such a burden on very young children.

And perhaps more importantly, parents like Sasha’s should remember these precious early years belong to their children, not to them.

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Betrayal of bright pupils: Two thirds of British pupils who shine at age of 11 are steered into soft subjects at High School

Two thirds of bright teenagers are missing out on key academic GCSEs, school league tables reveal. More than 111,000 of the 177,000 children who shone in tests at the age of 11 have gone on to study the softer subjects often shunned by employers.

While all pupils must study English, maths and science, the tables suggest schools are steering youngsters toward drama, sociology and vocational qualifications – which are seen as easier to do well in – for their remaining subjects.
Students sitting their GCSE examinations

Less than four in ten pupils across the state sector sit a GCSE in foreign languages, while just under half opt for geography or history.

The Coalition has introduced a new measure to check how many pupils score grades A* to C in English, maths and science, as well as a language and a humanities subject such as history or geography.

Before the introduction of this ‘English Baccalaureate’, the measure was five good grades in maths and English and in any three other subjects.

The tables published yesterday show the success rate for thousands of state schools plunged when the EBacc was taken into account. One school scored 92 per cent on the old measure but just 6 per cent on the new. The tables also revealed how low, medium and high achievers performed in their GCSEs last year.

Among the pupils who had surpassed expectations in national curriculum tests at 11, 62.8 per cent – 111,437 – failed to achieve the EBacc. Less than half of this 177,447-strong cohort had been entered for all the EBacc subjects in the first place.

In 285 schools, not a single high achiever gained the award.

Thousands of bright pupils are also effectively going backward in English and maths at secondary school. Some 22,713 – 12.8 per cent – are not making the progress expected of them in English and 26,262 – 14.8 per cent – are not improving sufficiently in maths.

Chris McGovern, a former headmaster and chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said bright children were ‘clearly being failed’. He added: ‘This is a betrayal of a generation of children who are not being prepared for the 21st century and they’re not being prepared to help sustain this country with the economic challenges it faces.

‘It’s failing children and damaging the country. The consequences will be found out in five, ten years’ time when we’re not producing the engineers and the scientists but we are producing the media studies students.’

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said: ‘The emphasis in recent years has been getting as many children as possible up to the floor targets and we haven’t been giving enough attention to our brightest pupils.

‘It’s important that young people study the core subjects because that keeps their options open. ‘Within our system, where schools have been judged in terms of GCSE points, it’s been too easy and too tempting for young people to drift away from the subjects that would be in their best interests.’

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said: ‘Children only have one chance at education. These tables show which schools are letting children down. Heads should be striving to make improvements year on year, and we will not let schools coast with mediocre performance. ‘We are driving up standards right across the board.’

The figures showed that 45.6 per cent of ‘medium’ achievers – almost 120,000 – who reached the standard expected of their age in national curriculum tests aged 11 failed to get five good grades in subjects including English and maths. More than 2,800 of the nation’s 3,000 schools had fewer than half their pupils gaining the EBacc standard as well.

Teenagers at selective schools were almost five times as likely to achieve the EBacc than pupils in comprehensives. The figures were 68.1 per cent and 13.7 per cent respectively, according to data released by the Department for Education.

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The private sector is ushering in a university revolution in Britain

Delays to the Higher Education Bill will not stop the rise of privately-funded universities.

For the higher education sector, these are interesting times. This September, fees will rise by more than 200 per cent at most universities; a new loan scheme will be in place; the quota system for allocating places will be relaxed to enable greater competition; and an auction process for 20,000 places will be introduced. This is hardly a Government that can be accused of ducking the difficult issues.

At the same time, however, ministers have not had it all their own way. Earlier this week, it was reported that David Willetts’s plans for private universities had been put on hold. Certainly, the Government’s Higher Education Bill – which was expected to introduce a host of reforms that would enable the expansion of provision by private institutions, as outlined in the Coalition’s White Paper – has been delayed. It is unlikely to be published before 2015, for lack of parliamentary time, although the Government insists that nothing has yet been decided.

On the surface, this might seem strange. If ministers encourage new “free schools” to increase competition and offer greater choice and diversity, surely it makes sense to do the same with universities? Across the world, private higher education is growing, since governments cannot afford to continue to fund the old system, under which only a tiny elite of the population attended university.

Critics of such institutions, who have an interest in maintaining the status quo, point to the situation in America, and warn that the same might happen here. But the US has some of the world’s best private universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT. Embracing a private model does not mean that standards have to be compromised.

In 2004, Labour “modernised the criteria for the granting of degree-awarding powers in the UK”. Since then, some of Britain’s most prestigious private providers in specialist fields have earned the right to issue their own degrees: Ashridge Business School, the College of Law, IFS School of Finance, and BPP University College, where I am principal. The route to obtaining this power is an exacting one. It rightly requires us to demonstrate the very highest standards over time, with our efforts reviewed by our public-sector peers. Because such standards are expected, it has not damaged the reputation of Britain as a higher education community.

At BPP University College, we work with employers to offer degree programmes in business, law, accounting and finance that are closely tailored to the needs of those professions. We operate in 14 cities, training almost a third of new entrants to the legal profession and two thirds of all accountants at some point in their careers.

One of the advantages of private provision – which could be emulated by traditional institutions – is that we offer students choice. Undergraduates can study through the long summer holidays, completing a degree in two years and avoiding the costs of a third year out of the workforce. Alternatively, they can opt for the traditional schedule. We employ a full-time faculty who have been practitioners of their discipline: lawyers and accountants who understand the latest developments, and are not just confined to academic research. This model does not suit everyone, but the CBI’s survey of employers last year indicated that private providers are best at meeting the needs of employers.

The Higher Education Bill was expected to make it easier to set up more institutions such as ours, and to integrate them more closely into the university system. It would also have given students greater access to information about universities and courses, empowering them to make informed choices in a more competitive environment.

There is no doubt that higher education in Britain is in need of modernisation – and there is room for a high-quality private sector that challenges the educational status quo. Delaying the Higher Education Bill will not stop it from developing.

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Why Brits are no longer so keen on being green: Number of people willing to change the way they live falls by 10%

Public concern about climate change is on the wane

The number of people willing to alter the way they live in the hope of making a difference to global warming fell by around 10 per cent last year. There was also a sharp drop in those who regarded themselves as ‘fairly concerned’ about climate change.

The figures, released by the Government yesterday, suggest that doubts about global warming have been growing since the summer of 2009. This was before the damage inflicted on the cause by the ‘Climategate’ scandal later that year, in which leading scientists were accused of manipulating data to support the case of man-made climate change.

The credibility of global warming and concern about halting it appears to have been affected by the succession of three cold winters between 2008 and 2010.

More recently, doubts about the efficiency of wind turbines and the high costs of the Coalition’s drive for renewable energy have seen enthusiasm for the cause dwindling.

Fewer than two thirds now say they are at least ‘fairly concerned’ about climate change or that they are prepared to do something about it, figures published by the Department for Transport said.

According to the research, carried out by the Office for National Statistics, the share of the population who were at least fairly convinced that climate change was happening has dropped from 86 per cent in 2006 to 76 per cent last summer.

Over the same period, those who felt fairly concerned fell from 81 per cent to 65 per cent, and numbers willing to change their behaviour went down from 77 per cent to 65 per cent.

Fewer people said they were willing to use public transport or reduce how often they used their car, and only one in five said they would cut back on air travel. Most opposed higher taxes on air travel and petrol.

The findings came as the Government published a risk assessment warning of thousands of deaths because of climate change in coming decades. The report from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said Britain risks ‘sleepwalking into disaster’.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said: ‘It shows what life could be like if we stopped our preparations now, and the consequences such a decision would mean for our economic stability.’

But Dr Benny Peiser, of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: ‘Climate change is dropping off the political agenda. The person in the pub no longer cares. It is bottom of their list of priorities.’

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Mosley v Google censorship battle

We read:

“Google has removed hundreds of web pages relating to former motorsport boss Max Mosley’s sex life from its search results index, Britain’s Leveson Inquiry on press standards has heard.

But the internet giant said it dealt with requests for material to be excluded on a country-by-country basis, meaning articles and videos might remain accessible on other national versions of its site.

Mr Mosley told the inquiry in November he had spent over £500,000 ($750,000) trying to restore his reputation after a March 2008 News of the World article alleging he had a “sick Nazi orgy”, something he strongly denied.

He described his strenuous efforts to get articles removed from websites, adding: “The fundamental thing is that Google could stop this appearing but they don’t or won’t as a matter of principle.”

Google legal director Daphne Keller on Thursday confirmed that someone in Mr Mosley’s position would have to apply individually to have web pages, known as URLs, removed from the company’s sites in different countries. She told the inquiry: “I would hope that wouldn’t be a terribly difficult thing to do, and I can tell you that in his case we have removed hundreds of URLs.”

Ms Keller said a defamatory video could be removed from one of Google’s national sites but remain up on another. “If there is a country whose law says that that should stay up, then in that country we would comply with that law,” she said.

But the lawyer rejected a suggestion that Google should block certain search terms. She said: “In the Max Mosley case, obviously there has been all kinds of news coverage about this very inquiry, and other coverage that’s legitimate, and that you wouldn’t want to disappear from search results.”

Source

The libel judgment in his favour obtained by Mosley was handed down in London by The Hon. Mr. Justice Eady. Mr Justice Eady is well-known for leaning towards the plaintiff in libel suits, bringing that entire area of British law into disrepute. His notorious judgments often lead to censorship of material that most people would think should remain uncensored. His ruling was particularly obnoxious in the Rachel Ehrenfeld case, causing the NY legislature to pass a special law to protect her from any consequences of Eady’s judgment. So I have no confidence in Eady’s ruling favouring Mr Mosley

That lack of confidence is strongly supported by the fact that Mosley has made strenuous efforts to have the video of his behavior suppressed. If the video just showed him having a cup of tea, why would he want it suppressed? Clearly it does at least in part support the allegations made.

To help circumvent the Mosley/Eady censorship attempts, I have made a copy of one report of the matter that is still up and reposted it here. Under U.S. law it would be regarded as in the public interest for public figures to have information about their deeds known.

I am not in fact particularly critical of Mr Mosley’s actions in this matter. As I see it, it is Mr Justice Eady who has poisoned the well in the matter. He appears to have developed de novo a law of privacy that has no regard to the truth or merit of the allegations. The USA is not alone in having unelected judges who create law that would never pass muster before a democratically-elected legislature.

So until the British parliament steps in, I will continue in skepticism towards British libel judgments. The problem is well-known in Britain and the present government has promised corrective legislation — but no such legislation appears to be on the horizon yet.

jonjayray — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:00:25 +0000

Number waiting over four hours in casualty soars by 40% in one year since targets were scrapped

The number of patients spending more than four hours in casualty has jumped 40 per cent in a year. The figure rose to nearly 900,000 in 2010/11 compared with just under 600,000 in the 12 months before.

Last year the Government scrapped a target brought in by Labour that 98 per cent of A&E patients must be seen within four hours claiming it had ‘no clinical justification’. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley then brought in a new 95 per cent figure.

But a report by the NHS Information Centre shows that this new target has been missed – 5.6 per cent of patients waited longer than four hours last year. A total of 891,916 were delayed for longer than four hours last year compared with 598,379 in 2009/10.

There is increasing evidence that waiting times across the NHS are now gradually creeping back up again having hit an all-time low. Higher numbers are facing longer delays for ultrasounds, CT scans and routine operations than was the case two years ago.

Increasing financial strains coupled with confusion caused by the controversial health reforms are thought to be taking their toll on waiting times and overall patient care.

Andy Burnham, Labour’s health spokesman, accused the Government of pushing the NHS ‘to the edge of a cliff’. He added: ‘One of the Health Secretary’s first acts on taking office was to downgrade Labour’s firm grip on A&E waiting times. Now the Government has even missed its own lower target. Labour left waiting times at a historic low, but the Government has thrown all this away.

‘This is exactly what we warned would happen when they relaxed waiting times targets and launched the biggest top-down costly reorganisation of the NHS. ‘This is a stark warning from a health service in increasing distress.’

A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘The figures published today refer to total time spent in A&E, including time waiting to be seen and time taken to be treated.’

‘We are determined to improve the quality of care in accident and emergency. That is why we have developed quality indicators which measure what actually matters to patients – whether they are treated effectively at A&Es, as well as whether they are being treated in a timely way.’

Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association said: ‘We do not want to go back to the days where clinical judgement was distorted by looming targets but, equally, patients should not have to wait for hours on end.’

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Two Church of England clergymen ‘conducted hundreds of sham marriages to help illegal immigrants stay in Britain’

This is another aspect of the way the CofE now preaches a Leftist gospel rather than the gospel of Christ. These bozos probably thought that what they were doing was right

Two Church of England vicars conducted ‘hundreds’ of sham marriages to help illegal immigrants stay in Britain, a court heard today.

The Reverend Elwon John, 44, and Reverend Brian Shipsides, 55, performed the sham wedding ceremonies at All Saints Church in Forest Gate, east London, jurors were told.

Once wed there were a ‘strikingly high proportion’ who then made applications to the Home Office for the right to remain in the country.

In some cases, EU nationals were even flown into Britain just so the marriages could take place before being flown straight out again, Inner London crown court heard.

According to the prosecution, 31-year-old ‘fixer’ Amdudalat Ladipo – herself an illegal immigrant – arranged the weddings between mainly Nigerian and EU nationals.

It was not until officers from the Metropolitan Police and UK Border Agency caught wind of the scam that the trio were finally rumbled on July 31, 2010.

All three are now charged with conspiring to facilitate unlawful immigration. Shipsides has already pleaded guilty. Ladipo and John deny the charges.

David Walbank, prosecuting, said: ‘This case involves a massive and systematic immigration fraud. ‘At the centre of this fraud is one particular parish church in the east of London, All Saints Church in Forest Gate.

‘The Crown’s case is that there took place in that church over a two-and-a-half year period a very large number indeed of sham marriages entered in to for the purpose of immigration.

‘Most of the so-called couples participated in these marriage ceremonies were not actually couples at all. ‘They were married in that church not because they wished to spend their lives together and wanted the blessing of the church; most of the persons married there for a very different reason. ‘Their ultimate purpose was to obtain enhanced rights to enter and live in the United Kingdom.’

Mr Walbank told jurors the majority of the marriages which took place were between Nigerians and nationals from the European Economic Area (EEA), mainly from Portugal and the Netherlands. He added: ‘The fraud, the Crown suggest, wasn’t confined to one or two, or even a couple of dozen of ceremonies. We are concerned in this case with hundreds of sham marriages. ‘On some occasions EEA nationals were flown into the UK specially for marriages to take place and then flown back out again.’

The court heard Nigerian Ladipo may also have been involved in fixing sham marriages at other churches, although the jury were told she only faces charges in relation to weddings at All Saints.

When police attended the church in July 2010 after being told a number of sham weddings were due to take place there that day they found Ladipo there.

The court heard one of the officers approached her and asked her why she was there. She replied one of her friends was getting married. However, when asked for her friend’s name she is said to have become agitated and was later seen trying to get rid of a brown envelope under a bush in the church grounds.

When seized the enveloped was found to contain a number of ID documents which were not hers and sham paperwork relating to the marriages and she was arrested. Rev John, the curate at All Saints Church, and parish priest Rev Shipsides were arrested a few days later on August 3.

Mr Walbank told jurors: ‘If the sham marriages hadn’t been stopped they would have continued at a rate of knots as there were many more booked at the church that would have taken place.’

Jurors heard Ladipo herself may have entered into a sham marriage with a Dutch national in February 2010. ‘Her reason for going through with the marriage we suggest is entirely consistent with the motive of others at All Saints Church during the indictment period, to stay in the country,’ said Mr Walbank.

Shipsides, of Forest Gate, east London, has already admitted conspiring to facilitate unlawful immigration.

Ladipo, of Dagenham, and John, of Barking, both in east London, deny the same charge. Ladipo also denies possessing false identity documents. The trial, expected to take four weeks, continues.

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And another one!

Rev Canon Dr Patrick John Magumba

A vicar who conducted 28 sham marriages to allow illegal immigrants to stay in the UK has been jailed for two and a half years. The Reverend Canon John Magumba, 58, married Nigerians to European Union residents to allow them “all the benefits from residence” in this country. The Ugandan-born vicar, a father of six, also pocketed over £8,000 paid in wedding fees for the ceremonies in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.

Magumba, who appeared at Bolton Crown Court wearing an open neck shirt and no dog collar, pleaded guilty to a breach of the Immigration Act and two charges of theft totalling £8,345. The vicar, who came to Britain from Uganda in 2004, was the team vicar for three churches in Rochdale.

The sham marriages were exposed when church officials noticed a massive explosion in the number of weddings following Magumba’s appointment.

An investigation by the UK Border agency found that there had been 28 sham weddings between Nigerians and EU nationals.

At one church there had been no weddings between 1996 and 2007 but then 21 between 2007 and 2010 – only one of which was genuine.

Magumba, of Deeplish, Rochdale married two women with the same name and same age within a week of each other. He claimed that the women were twins and that it was an African tradition to give twins the same name.

The vicar conducted marriages in secret and failed to read the banns for others or to check the addresses which had been given. He ignored a Church working party instruction to make sure that foreign nationals wanting to marry provide passports, utility bills and addresses “to ensure they were a genuine loving couple.”

The court heard an independent economic report showed that a single illegal immigrant cost the taxpayer £10,000 a year and one with a dependent child cost £23,000 a year.

Mr Hunter Gray, defending, said Magumba had been driven by a “genuine but misguided desire” to help others. “He is a man of genuinely held and deeply felt Christian beliefs and he has fallen spectacularly from grace. “He feels shame and embarrassment that he has let so many people down.”

Judge William Morris jailed him for two years for the immigration offence and six months for the thefts, to run consecutively. He told him: “You repeatedly breached immigration laws which are properly designed to prevent those with no entitlement to reside in the Uk from doing so. “These legal restrictions are essential to ensure taxpayers’ money is only applied to the needs of fellow citizens.”

Immigration Minister Damien Green said after the sentence: “This sentence sends a clear message to anyone breaking our immigration laws that Britain is not a soft touch. “We work closely with the Church to identify sham marriages and identify those who seek to abuse the institution of marriage.”

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Archbishop blasts clerics who oppose welfare reform and declares REAL moral scandal is our £1 trillion debt

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey today launches an astonishing attack on the five bishops trying to derail the Government’s £26,000-a-year benefit cap.

In an article for the Daily Mail, Lord Carey insists the sheer scale of Britain’s public debt – which yesterday hit £1trillion – is the ‘greatest moral scandal’ facing the country and warns the welfare system is rewarding ‘fecklessness and irresponsibility’.

He is scathing about all opponents of the proposed limit on benefits – who include Labour peers and Liberal Democrat rebels – but reserves his most outspoken criticism for the Anglican bishops, who led the rebellion in the House of Lords.

He said they encouraged the culture of welfare dependency which led to ‘poverty of aspiration’, and warned them that they could lay no claim to the ‘moral high ground’.

‘If we can’t get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren,’ he writes.

Lord Carey hails Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith as a ‘committed Christian’ who is trying to reform a welfare system which is ‘fuelling vices and impoverishing us all’.

Downing Street insisted last night that its plan to impose an annual limit on welfare payments would be implemented ‘in full’ despite the dramatic defeat in the Lords. Labour leader Ed Miliband’s decision to try to derail Government plans for a cap, designed to ensure workless households cannot receive more than the average working family, was branded a ‘total disaster’ by his own shadow ministers.

Amid accounts of chaos and confusion in the run up to a crunch vote, several frontbenchers expressed despair that the party had appeared to put itself on the side of benefit claimants over working families.

Labour issued a tortured explanation of its stance, claiming it did not in fact support bishops’ plans to exclude Child Benefit from the cap, but wanted an opportunity to return the legislation to the Commons to make different amendments.

In his attack on the bishops, Lord Carey says it is clear that the welfare system ‘desperately’ needs to be reined in and insists it is ‘obvious’ that employment must pay more than a life on benefits.

‘Considering that the system they are defending can mean some families are able to claim a total of £50,000 a year in welfare benefits, the bishops must have known that popular opinion was against them, including that of many hard-working, hard-pressed churchgoers,’ he writes.

‘Yet these five bishops – led by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds – cannot lay claim to the moral high-ground.

‘The sheer scale of our public debt, which hit £1trillion yesterday, is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today. If we can’t get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren.’

Lord Carey is particularly scathing about the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Rt Rev John Packer, who led the Lords revolt by invoking the Bible and Jesus’s concern for children. ‘I can’t possibly believe that prolonging our culture of welfare dependency is in the best interests of our children,’ he writes.

The Cabinet discussed Monday night’s defeat in the Lords when it met yesterday. It agreed to reverse the amendment when the legislation returns to the Commons.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said: ‘I think the vast majority of people think it is fair to say that you can’t receive more in benefits than if you were to earn £35,000 before tax.

He added that the Government had already increased out-of-work benefits by 5.2 per cent for this year, saying: ‘We want to make sure that those who are vulnerable are properly supported but that at all times in the welfare system there are incentives to work and that it pays to work.’

But Enver Solomon, policy director at the Children’s Society, warned the Government not to ignore the Lords’ vote. He said: ‘Children should not be held responsible and penalised for the employment circumstances of their parents.’

Labour peers backed the bishops’ amendment, to exclude Child Benefit from the cap, despite the party saying it supported the principle. It said it would aim to add additional safeguards when the proposals return to the Commons.

But one Labour frontbencher said: ‘Do you imagine my constituents are going to understand the idea that we support a cap but have voted against it? They will just think we support unlimited handouts for people out of work. It is a total disaster.’

Conservative Deputy Chairman Michael Fallon said: ‘Ed Miliband has failed the key test of his leadership. He has promised to “take the tough decisions” on reforming welfare. But his party in the Lords supported a wrecking amendment to ensure that some families get thousands of pounds more in benefits than the average family earns by working.’

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Eight out of ten Brits claiming benefits ARE fit to work, according to new incapacity tests

Eight out of ten people tested for new incapacity benefits were found to be fit for work, official figures revealed yesterday. The Department for Work and Pensions decided that 57 per cent of claimants were no longer eligible for the hand-outs. A further 21 per cent could carry out some sort of work with the right support.

Just one fifth of claimants – 22 per cent – were found unable to do any form of employment.

Around 1.5million people who have been claiming Incapacity Benefit are being reassessed for its replacement – the Employment Support Allowance – to see if they are able to carry out work.

The latest figures show the numbers claiming ESA and Incapacity Benefit have dropped to their lowest level since 1996 following the introduction of the tests.

There are still 2.6million people claiming the benefits, nearly a million of whom have been on them for more than a decade.

Figures relating to claims lodged between March and May last year show that 38 per cent were dismissed at the first stage – before face-to-face assessments were carried out – while 48 per cent were subjected to further consideration. A further 14 per cent of claimants are still being assessed.

The latest analysis also shows there has been a decrease in the number of people claiming for drug and alcohol-related conditions – from 105,110 in May 2010 to 100,120 in May last year.

Employment Minister Chris Grayling said: ‘These reforms are changing the landscape of our country. ‘By concentrating on what people can do, we will help people back into work and out of the trap of benefits that has blighted communities.

‘We want to help everyone who can be in work to get there, not just for themselves but for their children. It is clear that the majority of new claimants to sickness benefits are in fact able to do some work.’

But critics have warned that the new testing regime is flawed – and a report by MPs on the work and pensions select committee recently found that large numbers of seriously unwell claimants have been wrongly refused support and high numbers of appeals have proved successful.

Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted the new system is much better at putting people through their ‘paces’.

Claimants who pass the first stage of assessment are then placed in three groups: Those who need permanent support, those who might be able to work after a few months and those fit to work. If placed in the latter category they are told to resubmit a benefits application – but this time for Jobseekers Allowance.

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Unhappy windmill owners in Shetland

Serious and widespread breakdowns — and the maker has gone broke

A solution may be on the horizon for owners of Proven P35-2 wind turbines in Shetland nearly four months after they were ordered to shut down their machines following catastrophic weld failures elsewhere in Scotland.

The Microgeneration Certification Scheme, the body that decides which small renewable devices qualify for government power generation subsidies, said this week a way forward had been identified for the flawed £60,000 machines and agreement on the solution should be reached within weeks.

The MCS said: “Once the agreed solution has been finalised MCS will instruct the installation companies to advise their customers of the remedial work that will be required to restart the turbines.”

The long-awaited breakthrough for P35-2 owners, including the handful in Shetland, follows a meeting last week between the MCS’ certification body and the various parties involved with the turbines.

However with hundreds of the machines in existence in Scotland and elsewhere it remains to be seen when a turbine installer will be in a position to attend to the out-of-action machines in Shetland.

The 12.1 kiloWatt P35-2 was suspended from MCS certification on 23rd September after three spectacular main shaft failures. The drastic technical problem brought down Proven Energy itself followed by two of its main installers, Icon Energy and Shetland Wind Power. Proven was later bought by the large Irish firm Kingspan but it washed its hands of the old company’s turbine customers.

Shetland Wind Power’s customer base and some other assets were bought by VG Energy, an Ayrshire-based turbine installer which has been working on a solution to the P35-2 shaft problem.

A new company, still called Shetland Wind Power, has been set up. VG Energy’s founders, farmers Jim Paterson and Stephen Hamilton, also formed two other new companies called Shetland Turbines and Shetland Renewables. VG has ignored several approaches from The Shetland Times for information to provide to its readers.

Until the P35-2 solution is agreed and applied to the turbines the MCS has advised that the brake should be kept on to keep them out of action, although some have been running from time to time since the shutdown was ordered last year.

The news of movement on the P35-2 problem was welcomed by SNP Highlands and Islands MSP Jean Urquhart this week. She said: “I am delighted that progress is now being made and that these machines should soon be working again. “There are many of these turbines in Shetland and a number of owners have contacted me regarding the difficulties they are facing.”

Each owner has been losing potentially thousands of pounds a month from not being able to claim subsidy, enjoy free electricity or sell excess power into the Shetland grid.

As well as problems with the rotor heads there now seems to be question marks over the towers that the P35-2 turbines are built on. A machine owned by Norman and Evelyn Leask at Snarness, near West Burrafirth, suffered a catastrophic failure of its tower during a north-westerly storm at the end of last year. The steel tower broke in two, causing the turbine to crash to the ground.

Another leading turbine company, Evoco, is having to beef-up its 10kW turbine designs after suffering machine failures during gales in Yorkshire. There has been a problem with a rotational bearing which causes blades to snap off. Owners were told to shut them down and Evoco pledged to compensate them for lost feed-in tariff subsidy.

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Map-makers admit Greenland gaffe

That poisonous Greenie influence is pervasive. Truth is the least of their concerns

The 2011 version of the map, left, incorrectly showed ice-loss

IT APPEARED to provide incontrovertible proof that global warming was accelerating faster than even the most doom-laden scientists had predicted.

There was considerable alarm when the word’s most authoritative atlas printed a map which showed that Greenland was rapidly turning green.

However, experts from around the globe pointed out that the cataclysmic chart had no scientific support and was contradicted by all of the most recent satellite images.

Now the Scottish map-makers responsible for the disappearance of 115,830 square miles of polar ice have admitted publicly they were wrong. As an act of contrition, The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World cartographers have produced a new map which restores Greenland’s ice cover.

Jethro Lennox, senior publishing editor of the £150 tome, insisted lessons would be learned from the episode, which generated headlines around the globe. The Glasgow-based map-maker said: “We’re very disappointed at the way it happened. “But we are now looking to draw a line under the Greenland controversy and move on.”

The latest atlas, which was published in September, showed a reduction in ice cover compared with the previous edition from four years ago.

Accompanying publicity material declared the change represented “concrete evidence” of the effects of global warming, stating: “For the first time the new edition has had to erase 15 per cent of Greenland’s permanent ice cover – turning an area the size of the UK and Ireland ‘green’ and ice-free.”

Publishers HarperCollins originally stood by the accuracy of the map but have since admitted to the mistake after the blunder was exposed by scientists.

Mr Lennox said: “After publication of the 13th edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World it became apparent that we had not represented the permanent ice cover in Greenland fully and clearly. “In failing to do that, this section of the map did not meet the usual high standards of accuracy and reliability that the atlas strives to uphold. “To correct this, we decided to produce a new, more detailed map using the latest information available.” A new, corrected map of Greenland will be inserted into all remaining copies.

The updated chart was put together after the cartographers consulted experts from the University of Arizona, the University of Bristol, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and the Byrd Polar Research Centre.

The editor claimed the newly established links would prevent errors in future. He said: “We have made some valuable contacts and will be keen to work with them again in the future.”

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One in three top British companies can’t fill graduate vacancies: Too many leave university without the right skills, say bosses

One in three top companies left graduate jobs unfilled last year amid complaints about the quality of recruits, a report warns today. Rising numbers of employers failed to meet recruitment targets, citing university-leavers’ skills as a problem.

The shortfall comes despite rising unemployment and the fact that it is estimated there are at least 48 applications per graduate vacancy. One graduate in six now obtains a first – double the figure from a decade ago – while almost half get a respectable 2:1.

But a study by the Association of Graduate Recruiters turns the spotlight on the quality of graduates entering the job market.

One accountancy employer has already been forced to downgrade some graduate positions to target school-leavers because they are deemed ‘stronger’.

With graduate vacancies predicted to fall by 1.2 per cent in 2011-12, the AGR yesterday warned students they would need more than just a good degree to land plum jobs.

Chief executive Carl Gilleard said they needed ‘transferable skills’ such as the ability to work in teams and communicate well, and urged them to spend more time on their applications, covering basics such as spell-checking letters.

The association surveyed more than 200 members – including Marks & Spencer, Ernst & Young, GCHQ, John Lewis, the Bank of England, Grant Thornton and Procter & Gamble – about graduate recruitment last November.

Graduate vacancies increased by 1.7 per cent in 2010-11 but some companies still had problems recruiting due to a ‘lack of applicants or poor-quality applications’. Similar problems are anticipated for 2011-12.

Around 32.2 per cent of employers failed to fill all graduate vacancies in the 2010-11, a 6.2 percentage point increase on 2009-10.

Two-fifths (40.6 per cent) could not fill up to five per cent of their vacancies. A ‘lack of the right applicants’ was one of the reasons, with employers ‘highlighting that applicants’ skill levels often did not meet their requirements’.

An employer from the public sector said: ‘When we’ve got a starting point of around 1,000 applications I’d be really surprised if I couldn’t fill six vacancies, whereas if I was looking for 30 I might struggle a bit.’

The AGR report says: ‘This was more problematic for an employer from an engineering and industrial company who reported that they were struggling to recruit skilled engineering graduates.

‘They explained that whilst they receive good international applications, they experience difficulties achieving security clearance at the right level to employ them and so there is an urgent need for more skilled British engineering graduates to remedy this situation.’

An accountancy employer added: ‘Graduates are perhaps spending less time on their applications.

‘If I had one key message to get across it would be yes, there’s competition, but just make sure that every single application they submit is the best they can possibly do.’

Another employer pointed out that some ‘school-leavers were stronger than graduates’ so it had converted a number of positions.

The report said some industries were beginning to suffer ‘in light of the inflexibility of the work-life balance’, with a number of companies failing to meet recruitment targets because graduates wanted a job that ‘allows them to have a life’.

The report comes as official figures yesterday raised fears that Britain could be facing a double-dip recession. Growth figures slowed by 0.2 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2011. Unemployment recently rose to a 17-year high of 2.68million.

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Scrap carbon tax say British politicians who believe it will have ‘devastating effect’ on industry

A carbon tax being introduced next year will increase household electricity bills and could have a ‘devastating effect’ on industry, MPs say. In a damning report they claim the ‘carbon price floor’ will saddle businesses with higher green penalties than the rest of Europe while failing to deliver any environmental benefits.

The Energy and Climate Change Committee urged the Treasury to scrap the plan and warned against revenue-raising exercises ‘disguised as a green policy’.

Chancellor George Osborne announced the levy on businesses for every tonne of carbon they emit last March. Starting at £16, it will almost double to £30 by 2020 for users of coal.

By ‘going it alone’ on setting a minimum levy, the UK faces the prospect of industry relocating to elsewhere in Europe, MPs warned.

Higher carbon costs also mean electricity prices will increase as the UK ends up effectively subsidising other European states, they added.

Committee chairman Tim Yeo said: ‘The Chancellor was right to say we won’t save the planet by putting the UK out of business. ‘Ironically, however, it is the Treasury’s decision to set a Carbon Price Floor that could result in industry and electricity production relocating to other EU countries. ‘Unless the price of carbon is increased at an EU-wide level, taking action on our own will have no overall effect on emissions other than to out-source them.

‘A revenue raising exercise disguised as a green policy won’t help anybody, the price of carbon has to be increased at an EU level to kick-start investment in clean energy.’

Energy generators and heavy industry, such as steel and ceramics, face an ‘exorbitant’ top-up tax of up to £25 per tonne of CO2 under current plans, according to the report. Although UK emissions will be reduced under the Treasury plans, overall levels across Europe may not, the report said.

It calls for EU targets to be toughened up to deliver a 30% emissions reduction target by 2020 and an overall 60-80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Mr Yeo added: ‘Instead of going it alone, the Chancellor would be better-off working with other European Governments to make the EU Emissions Trading System more effective as a whole. ‘Before phase three starts next year, EU countries must set aside pollution permits to end the glut that has caused the price of carbon to collapse.’

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jonjayray — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:54:02 +0000

Nurses didn’t give a damn. But I wasn’t going to let my gran die

Doctors told Hazel they could do nothing for her grandmother. But, as her shocking yet inspiring diary reveals, she nursed her back to health with love, tenacity… and a lot of custard

When doctors told Margaret Park’s family the 89-year-old was dying, her devoted granddaughter resolutely refused to accept the hospital’s prognosis. Hazel Carter, 41, stayed by her grandmother’s side for two weeks – determined to help her recover.

Meanwhile, she kept a moving diary, which gives a shocking insight into how easily old people can be ‘written-off’ by the NHS if they don’t have family to fight for them.

Earlier this week the Mail reported that four patients are dying hungry and thirsty on Britain’s hospital wards every day. Here Hazel, who runs a building company with her husband Andrew, 48, and lives in Scorton, Lancashire, with their son John, 20, tells the full, disturbing story of her grandmother Margaret’s stay at Blackpool Victoria Hospital…

SUNDAY, 13th MARCH, 2011

11pm: I am devastated. At 4pm I received a message to get to the hospital as soon as possible. Gran was admitted to hospital two days ago with a virus, but then I got the call to say she has just hours to live.

Mum was dreading telling me as she knew I would take it badly. Gran has always been an inspiration. She is the strongest, most determined and capable person I have ever met. I am a better person for having the privilege of knowing her and love her with every bone in my body.

When I arrived the whole family was gathered around her bed saying their goodbyes. I asked why the doctors couldn’t do anything to help. Mum said it was her time and her heart can’t take it any more.

I felt sick and helpless, but most of all I was angry nothing could be done and I couldn’t help asking: ‘Why not?’ Nobody knows the answer.

Gran was tired and confused but thankfully she knew me. A little later we all left to await news, but I just wanted to be with her so I returned to the hospital.

She’s on a drip, and a heart monitor that fluctuates all the time, and has an oxygen mask that she constantly pulls off as it obviously feels uncomfortable. I began to hold it for her. I also started offering her a drink via a straw every ten minutes.

As time passed she became ever so slightly more lucid, then a nurse arrived and gave her an injection and Gran was asleep again.

I’ve rung my husband Andrew and he says I can stay as long as I like. My son John arrived about 8pm and has been helping me wash her face and massage her limbs. I can’t believe all this is happening.

MONDAY, 14th MARCH

John stayed all night — what a good lad. Like me, he believes Gran is going to be ok.

This morning I asked the nurses what’s in the injections she’s receiving — it’s morphine. When I asked if it was helping her get better they looked at me strangely and said it was purely to keep her comfortable. But Gran isn’t uncomfortable and being knocked out, in my opinion, is not helping her recover.

When I asked why she wasn’t getting her normal medication before admission (she was being treated for an irregular heartbeat and thyroid problems) they just fobbed me off.

I asked my brother to bring in some custard as it’s easy to swallow and Gran ate a tub straight away. She was starving as she hasn’t eaten since Friday. I asked him to get more!

The specialist came about 8.30pm and took me and Mum into a room and again told us there was no hope.

I asked how they were so sure. After my endless questions the specialist said that only a miracle will keep my gran alive and even if this miracle happens she will never leave hospital or walk again. Apparently her heart is just too weak and she has pneumonia. But I’m not having any of it.

Mum gathered her brother and sisters and at 10pm they all went to see Granddad Jack, 89, to whom Gran’s been married for 65 years. The decision was made not to revive her if she goes downhill. I don’t agree but respect it’s their decision.

It’s now the early hours. I have just put my foot down and politely told the nurses not to give Gran any more morphine injections. It’s not helping her breathing.

In total she ate four tubs of custard today. She’s definitely improving.

TUESDAY 15th

11.30am: A specialist came again earlier and I asked why Gran isn’t being given her usual tablets. They told me she can’t have them because she is ‘nil by mouth’. It turned out someone had deemed her to be ‘nil by mouth’ previously because she wasn’t eating or drinking, and then no one had thought to challenge this decision. What a mess.

‘The specialist is still convinced Gran is dying — I am sick of telling them there is improvement and being ignored’

But nobody told me she couldn’t eat or drink, so I explained she had been eating and drinking through a straw and that’s what’s making her stronger. But now they have said I can’t give her anything at all and are going to send a different specialist to assess her further.

12.30pm: Gran’s saline drip bag, which is now the only thing keeping her hydrated, was taken away to be changed about an hour ago and still hasn’t come back.

9pm: I don’t believe what is happening — the nurses have changed shift and so we will have to wait until the morning for a new saline prescription! So she’s getting no food or liquid!

10pm: I have just sneaked her a bit of custard and her whole face lit up. You wouldn’t treat your worst enemy like this. It’s not the nurses’ fault. The doctors have clearly written Gran off, and they are short-staffed and just following instructions. The longer I am here, the more I know I can’t leave!

WEDNESDAY 16th

10am: Hurrah! We have the saline drip back up, so after nearly 24 hours she is getting fluids again. Still no sign of the specialist to assess her eating and I am sick of asking. Not convinced her heart monitor is working properly either. I know Gran has an irregular heartbeat but it’s up and down all the time.

Also, her catheter bag is full and there’s no one to change it — I have just drained it off into a sick bowl.

9pm: This afternoon they decided the heart monitor has malfunctioned and took it away. So her heart rate can’t be as bad as we have been led to believe. Gran’s still very weak but definitely getting better — she has been chatting about her mum to me. She would do even better if she was allowed to eat. It’s soul-destroying watching her starve.

THURSDAY 17th

8am: The eating specialists have just been and Gran has been diagnosed with dysphagia — difficulties with swallowing that mean fluid easily ends up in her lungs. But it means we can feed her again, as long as everything is thickened.

I’m tired today — I’ve been sleeping on three hard chairs in Gran’s room. I couldn’t cope without John coming to help me every night. He’s been sleeping on the floor.

The specialist is still convinced Gran is dying — I am sick of telling them there is improvement and being ignored.

FRIDAY 18th

10am: Really disgruntled. Gran needs her normal medications or this virus really will finish her. Why won’t they listen — she is not dying! Today we aim to have her sitting in the chair at visiting time — Granddad will be so pleased.

2pm: We made it. Granddad’s face was a picture when he walked in. She was in the chair with her hair done, teeth in and glasses on. Fab.

The improvements over the last couple of days have been incredible. Granddad keeps thanking me, but there’s no need. I feel a bit embarrassed.

Gran has just asked if I work for the hospital now. When I said no, she asked who was paying me — she’s still so sharp. She can’t get her head round the fact that I am here simply because I love her.

SATURDAY 19th

11am: Gran had some porridge this morning and custard. She must feel better.

2am: Well, that’s it. The battle’s over — we are losing Gran just when I was sure she was going to be ok. I went home at 1pm but when I came back at 7pm Gran was hallucinating. I noticed pools of fluid under her skin on her shoulders, arms and legs. ‘I just want to take Gran home; she will mend so much quicker if she is with Granddad’

Uncle Andrew and (his wife) Aunty Elaine came and the staff nurse told us that her heart was not pumping properly and her liver had stopped functioning. Basically her internal organs have shut down. An hour ago a doctor confirmed it all.

It’s horrific. Uncle Andrew — Gran’s only son — has been crying, his head in his hands on the windowsill.

I just can’t believe I was so wrong. We have to tell the family again tomorrow. At least Granddad spent the day with her. My heart is breaking.

SUNDAY 20th

3pm: I can’t believe this place! Mum just overheard two nurses talking about Gran in the corridor.

Apparently the cannula in her hand (a tube inserted into a vein to administer the saline drip) came loose, so the fluid was being pumped under her skin instead of into her system. Cannulas are meant to be changed every couple of days but it hadn’t been done — because they expected her to die I suppose.

So nothing is wrong with Gran’s organs. She was hallucinating because the fluid was not going into her and she was dehydrated.

A stupid mistake has caused all this heartache and pain. Unbelievable … Lost for words.

TUESDAY 22nd

5.45am: Andrew and Elaine were here tonight. We have not had a wink of sleep. Gran woke at 2am saying she couldn’t breathe and panicking like mad. Clearly she was given something yesterday that wasn’t thickened properly so has liquid on her lungs.

The nurse was going to sedate her, but I managed to calm her down. The last thing she needs is sedation! I just want to take Gran home; she will mend so much quicker if she is with Granddad.

Andrew brought me an electric blow-up bed yesterday and it’s so comfy I just want to curl up and go to sleep.

WEDNESDAY 23rd

9.30pm: The Tesco at Poulton ran out of custard yesterday — Gran has eaten it all …

At last everyone is realising Gran’s not going to die, and people are starting to talk about what happens next.

Some of the family don’t think we can manage at home and are talking about a rehabilitation place. But if she goes there she’ll never come home.

If she’s home I can dedicate more time than any hospital. Everyone’s tempers are becoming frayed with frustration, emotion and tiredness. I feel awful because I got angry today. We all want what’s best, and the hospital’s attitude has not helped.

Gran is fast asleep now. I have got my bed blown up and will be joining her soon.

THURSDAY 24th

11am: Doctor Adam Yates has just been. He’s one of the junior doctors here and saw Gran at her worst, but has been away since. He’s the first one to speak to her, not just to us, and he was genuinely overwhelmed by how far she has come.

3pm: Physio has just been and Gran walked two strides — they are now happy that we can manage on our own. Just the rest of the family and Occupational Therapy to convince now!

Been talking about my house renovations with Gran. I said: ‘I don’t think I will ever get it finished.’ And she said: ‘Just remember, when you’ve finished it, you’re finished with it.’

Her practicality and wisdom are why I love her so much. She could be discharged as soon as tomorrow.

FRIDAY 25th

3pm: The ward has been isolated due to an outbreak of vomiting and diarrhoea — we are going nowhere. Gran is disappointed and I should never have built up her hopes. We had a bit of a moment today — she was being all negative and I bluntly told her if she didn’t buck up she would not be allowed home. I even said I would leave her if that was what she wanted — very fed up and emotionally drained.

8pm: Just sorted Gran for bed. She seems to be all positive again so maybe a bit of a straight talk wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

SATURDAY 26th

I won’t let any of the nurses or cleaners into our room. So glad we are in a side room — the bays either side have the bug and if Gran gets it I don’t want to think what it could do.

SUNDAY 27th

8.45am: I was so tired, I’ve only just woken up. Nurse came in and said they gave Gran her meds and a drink in the night. It’s the first time since she arrived.

MONDAY 28th

9am: We are going home! We’ve done it, Gran. An occupational therapist has been and got her to sit on the bed, then stand and shuffle to a chair. She did it all, so they say we are ok with one carer.

2pm: She’s home! We didn’t wait for an ambulance and set off after lunch in Mum’s car. I will never forget Granddad’s face when she came through their door. It’s the longest they’ve ever been apart. Just brilliant.

AND NOW…

While Gran broke her leg in early July and had to return to hospital for an operation, she recovered well enough to celebrate her 65th wedding anniversary with a party in September and she and Granddad are still living at home together. She has a rich life and I will never, ever regret fighting so hard for her.

SOURCE

Out-of-hours GP took three hours to respond to urgent calls in south-west London… from his home in Norfolk

A doctor earning £230,000-a-year running an out-of-hours GP service failed to visit the sick and dying because he was staying in his £2.8million country mansion 140 miles away.

Dr Ravi Sondhi, 51, was responsible for ‘terrifying and dangerous’ failings that left nearly a million people without cover at night and weekends.

He took up to three hours to answer urgent calls, and siphoned off £100,000 from the out-of-hour service’s funds, a damning NHS report found yesterday.

Sondhi failed to visit his patients in London and Surrey face-to-face because he was staying in his £2.8million Edwardian mansion in Norfolk.

He also took £200,000 from two of his staff and £60,000 from a patient to buy properties – which they they stand to lose as Sondhi has been declared bankrupt and the property purchases were made solely in his name.

One patient who waited 12 hours to be seen by Sondhi died the same day. When a complaint was made, Sondhi’s company said ‘it could not cope with demand’.

The report by NHS South-West London said: ‘Having one doctor on call for 950,000 people cannot be considered safe, and certainly not without any back-up or additional cover’.

Rather than visiting patients, Sondhi would either divert the patient’s calls to a GP’s practice to visit them the next morning, wait for the next doctor on shift to visit the patient, or call the London Ambulance Service.

Sondhi was also paid by the NHS for working by day at his own GP practice in Croydon, and he also owned a string of residential care homes.

Through Croydoc, he was responsible for providing out-of-hours service for patients in Croydon, Kingston, Merton and Sutton using a panel of local GPs.

At one time he was chairman, medical director, operations director and financial director of Croydoc.

But rather than operate in the area, he and his wife stayed in Field Dalling Hall, a grand Victorian mansion in Fakenham, Norfolk weekends.

He took between one-and-a-half and three hours to answer urgent calls – the standard target was 20 minutes.

On one occasion 114 calls were logged to his phone overnight, he failed to record his actions following out-of-hours calls, and repeatedly cancelled his shifts without warning.

Yesterday Malcolm Wicks, Labour MP for Croydon North, called on Health Secretary Andrew Lansley to call in the police and also undertake an urgent investigation into the ‘shoddy saga of Croydoc’.

He said: ‘With the publication of this report, we now have chapter and verse about a major abuse of the health service.

‘It shows how one GP seized the chance, through the privatisation of an essential health service, to run things not in the interest of patients, but for personal gain.

‘The impact on some patients must have been at best stressful, at worst terrifying and dangerous.’

Sondhi, and his wife Dr Salma Uddin, 49, covered 11 per cent of all out-of-hours shifts at Croydoc.

But out of 13,208 home visits carried out by the service in 2009, he only visited 19 patients at home – the report heard that Sondhi carried out his wife’ s shifts despite her name being on the rota.

The damning report found that nine staff resigned while working for Sondhi, found a ‘a culture of bullying’ at the organisation and that he used ‘racist and intimidating’ language to staff.

Staff reported Uddin seeing a carpet salesman during work hours, visiting Homebase and taking her youngest daughter to work – expecting the receptionist to babysit.

Complaints against Sondhi included using a Croydoc driver to take his children to Martial Arts lessons and seeing his solicitor during work hours.

The report said that the couple ‘did most of their weekend work while at home in Norfolk. They could not therefore visit base or do visits.’

Uddin was struck off by the GMC last year over an unrelated incident involving bullying at a care home owned by the couple in Kenley, Surrey.

Dr Sondhi, who was declared bankrupt in January reportedly owing more than £11million – has been suspended from practising on an interim order by the General Medical Council (GMC).

Croydoc was supposed to be governed by a panel of GP’s business acumen, but in a further scathing comment the report said:

‘A number of the board members appeared to lack the knowledge needed to effectively run a multimillion pound out of hours business.’

Dr Dave Finch, joint medical director of NHS South West London, said: ‘This report reveals a shocking series of failings by one GP, who apparently managed to dupe his professional colleagues whilst letting down his patients and claimed payment for work he did not do.’

Dr Finch said the out-of-hours care was now the responsibility of a new organisation called Patient Care 24.

He added: ‘What Dr Sondhi did was wrong and local GPs and the NHS are very angry and shocked about the findings of this report.

‘All patients should be able to feel confident that a call to an out-of-hours GP service is going to be dealt with effectively and professionally. In very many cases that did not happen.’

A GMC spokesman said yesterday: ‘Dr Sondhi has been suspended from the medical register while we carry out an investigation. When we finish an investigation we can close the case or refer the doctor to a public hearing.’

SOURCE

Anti-social behaviour isn’t a crime… it’s just a nuisance: How lazy British police forces are failing to record and investigate offences

Muggings, burglaries and even rapes are being written off by police who wrongly record that no crime has taken place, a report says today. In some forces, up to one in four crimes is not being investigated properly because officers mistakenly choose to drop the inquiry.

Complaints of anti-social behaviour are being particularly badly handled with many crimes mislabelled as simply ‘nuisance’, a snapshot study has found. As a result, offences of harassment and disorder are airbrushed out, vanishing from official crime statistics with no hope of ever being solved.

Overall, officials discovered that most forces failed to record around one in ten crimes properly. In cases of anti-social behaviour, only a ‘low number’ of crimes were recorded and police remain poor at identifying repeat and vulnerable victims.

The failings come despite an outcry in the wake of cases such as the death of Fiona Pilkington and the murder of Garry Newlove.

Ministers want police chiefs to identify repeat victims and increase their response to low-level incidents which blight the lives of thousands. The latest figures are revealed after a review of police computer systems by officials at Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.

It examined whether crimes were recorded properly in the first place and if cases were later incorrectly written off under the category ‘no crime’.

A valid example of a ‘no crime’ would be when a motorist calls police to report vandalism but it is later found that masonry fell from a roof and damaged his car.

The HMIC review found that, on average, 87 per cent of ‘no crimes’ were correctly recorded last year, compared with 64 per cent in 2009.

Crimes considered included violent attacks, robbery, rape, burglary, vehicle crime and anti-social behaviour.

Decisions in cases of violence were correct 84 per cent of the time and in rape the average was far higher at 90 per cent. Officials found that some forces incorrectly recorded up to a quarter of all reports as ‘no crime’.

These forces were the Metropolitan Police, Avon and Somerset, Leicestershire, Staffordshire and West Yorkshire. The best force was Thames Valley Police, where 100 per cent of ‘no crime’ decisions were appropriate.

The survey looked at almost 5,000 records from 43 forces in England and Wales and the British Transport Police.

Officials said they are concerned that police call handlers may be the weak link in the chain because it is not easy to check their decisions.

Fears have been raised that police may be tempted to record disputed incidents as ‘no crime’ to improve performance or simply because they are too hard to solve.

But that means victims are unlikely to receive the same level of support and police fail to build up a picture of repeat offences and crime hotspots.

Last night Tory MP Priti Patel said: ‘The fact that police are prepared to write off serious crimes almost needs to be investigated itself – it is dreadful. How can they justify this to victims of crime?

‘Clearly there are police forces out there failing in their duty to protect the public and give support to victims to protect them. They need to learn from those doing the right thing.’

Vic Towell, of HMIC, said: ‘These results show that forces understand the importance of making correct “no crime” decisions, particularly for the more serious crime types. While the majority do well, the variation between the best and worst remains too wide and needs to improve.’

Policing Minister Nick Herbert said: ‘We commissioned this report to shine a light on recording practices and there are issues in some forces which need to be addressed.’

Two years ago the head of HMIC, Sir Denis O’Connor, warned that police are failing to get to grips with a tidal wave of anti-social behaviour.

He said the true number of loutish incidents could be twice as high as the 3.6million estimated by the Government.

The problem was highlighted by the death of Miss Pilkington, who killed herself and her disabled daughter after being tormented by thugs.

Police were heavily criticised after it emerged she made 33 calls for help before setting fire to her car in a layby near her Leicestershire home in 2007.

The murder of Mr Newlove, who was kicked to death after confronting teenagers outside his Warrington home in 2007, also showed the terrible toll of yobbery.

The research comes hard on the heels of news that year-on-year crime fell in some of the cities worst hit by the August riots. Senior officers admitted that looting and disorder may have only resulted in a handful of offences because of the way crimes are recorded.

SOURCE

Fury as British Defence Dept. fires hundreds of troops in job cuts… but not one penpusher

Public servants are a specially protected class just about everywhere

Not a single penpusher has been sacked under Ministry of Defence job cuts despite the ‘grotesque’ axing of hundreds of troops, a damning report reveals today.

MPs say it is ‘stark and shocking’ that no bureaucrats have been made compulsorily redundant yet 40 per cent of the military personnel culled were forced out.

In a scathing attack on the MoD, the Commons defence select committee hints that civil servants might also have received a better voluntary redundancy package.

‘The MoD should consider whether the terms offered to either the military or civilian staff [were] fair or appropriate,’ the MPs’ report says.

The committee also criticises the claim by top MoD mandarin Ursula Brennan that civilians were more likely to apply for voluntary redundancy because they were more ‘flexibly employable’. The report says: ‘This runs contrary to our experience.’

Under the Government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review, unveiled in 2010, the Forces must lose 17,000 personnel by 2015 – 7,000 from the Army and 5,000 each from the RAF and Royal Navy.

The MoD will eventually lose around 32,000 civil service posts. Ministers have been ordered to make £4.7billion of savings within four years and to plug a £38billion equipment overspend.

Some 2,900 servicemen and women were selected for the first tranche of redundancies last year, with the Army and RAF each losing 920 posts, and 1,020 being cut from the Navy.

But only 60 per cent applied for redundancy, meaning around 1,200 members of the Forces were sacked. A second round of 4,200 cuts was announced last week.

By comparison, not one civil servant has been forced to quit the MoD in the first two redundancy rounds, set to total 15,000 penpushers. Instead, all volunteered to leave.

The report says: ‘For military redundancies to be compulsory in 40 per cent of cases, yet for civilian redundancies to be compulsory in none, is so grotesque that it requires an exceptionally persuasive reason, which we are yet to hear.’

MPs say Forces personnel should be retrained in areas of the military where there are shortages, such as bomb disposal, logistics and healthcare.

Labour defence spokesman Jim Murphy said ministers were treading a ‘thin line between callousness and carelessness’ over the job cuts. ‘Thousands of service personnel are being unceremoniously sacked,’ he said. ‘It is essential that the painful impact of David Cameron’s decisions is minimised wherever possible.

‘The committee are right to suggest retraining for all those made compulsorily redundant.’

The MPs’ report – into the MoD’s annual report 2010–11 – also expresses dismay that the National Audit Office spending watchdog had refused to give the seal of approval to the department’s accounts for the fifth successive year.

SOURCE

Vitamin D deficiency in UK a ‘major problem’

This is a disgrace. Official scares about avoiding skin cancer by staying out of the sun would have to be a major factor in this. Sun-loving Australians must get 1,000 times more sun exposure than Brits but skin cancer is only a minor problem among them, not even requiring surgery, usually. A quick spray with liquid nitrogen and that is the end of it usually

A quarter of all toddlers in the UK are lacking Vitamin D, according to research.

Vitamin D supplements are recommended for those people at risk of deficiency, including all pregnant and breastfeeding women, children under five, and the elderly, but 74 per cent of parents know nothing about them and more than half of healthcare professionals are also unaware, the BBC said.

Dr Benjamin Jacobs, consultant paediatrician at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, described the issue as a “major problem”. He told BBC Breakfast: “We see about one case of rickets a month in our hospital, but that’s the very severe end of the disease. “There are many other children who have less severe problems – muscle weakness, delay in walking, bone pains – and research indicates that in many parts of the country the majority of children have a low level of Vitamin D.”

He explained that it was discovered that Vitamin D prevents rickets about 100 years ago when most children in London suffered from the disease, and it was later eradicated.

But then, in the 1950s, there was concern that children were getting too much Vitamin D in food supplements and cod liver oil and supplements were stopped. This was unlike in other Western countries where they continued, he said. Dr Jacobs said: “We thought they were unnecessary, possibly harmful, and that was a major mistake.”

He said parents are largely unaware of the risk of the condition, while health professionals are often taught that rickets is a disease of the past.

“It’s really only over the past 10 years or so that I’ve noticed children with Vitamin D deficiency. and still I would say today, the majority of doctors, health visitors, midwives, nurses, are not aware enough of the problem,” he said.

Asked about how vulnerable people can be given more Vitamin D, Dr Jacobs said current guidelines suggest taking drops or tablets, but experts are also looking into food supplementation.

He said it would not be harmful if people ended up with too much Vitamin D in their diet.

Current guidelines suggest that children and pregnant women should have 400 units a day, but he described this as a “conservative” level compared to the US, where he said a study suggested pregnant women should have 4,000 units. “In my view, it is extremely safe,” he added.

Chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies said the Government would be reviewing the issue. She said: “We know a significant proportion of people in the UK probably have inadequate levels of Vitamin D in their blood.

“People at risk of Vitamin D deficiency, including pregnant women and children under five, are already advised to take daily supplements. “Our experts are clear – low levels of Vitamin D can increase the risk of poor bone health, including rickets in young children.

“Many health professionals such as midwives, GPs and nurses give advice on supplements, and it is crucial they continue to offer this advice as part of routine consultations and ensure disadvantaged families have access to free Vitamin supplements through our Healthy Start scheme.

“It is important to raise awareness of this issue, and I will be contacting health professionals on the need to prescribe and recommend Vitamin D supplements to at-risk groups.

“The Department of Health has also asked the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition to review the important issue of current dietary recommendations on Vitamin D.”

SOURCE

No punishment for kids who bullied redhead

There is serious prejudice against redheads in England. If he had been a Muslim there would have been a huge uproar

A 12-year-old boy who was relentlessly bullied for having ginger hair was offered lessons in a class for ‘vulnerable’ pupils. Teachers suggested Tyler Walsh be taught in isolation to escape merciless taunts about his red hair, it has been claimed.

His furious mother Emma has pulled her son out of Year 8 and is tutoring him herself at home. She accused staff of failing to punish the gang responsible after just a single one-day suspension was handed out to the ringleader, it was alleged.

However the school – Yate International Academy – denied he would be taught in isolation and claimed his mother had misunderstood.

Ms Walsh, 33, says Tyler has been subjected to an 18-month campaign of bullying over the colour of his hair. She said: ‘It is not fair that Tyler should be bullied out of school. He wants to learn and has been getting excellent grades and earning points for his guild (house). ‘He was going to after-school science club and would like to become a scientist or science teacher. ‘He wants to go to school but not to that school.

‘I don’t feel my son will be safe at school so I am keeping him at home until he can start at another school next week. I will be tutoring him at home.’

Ms Walsh, from Yate, Bristol, sent Tyler to Yate International Academy 18-months ago, where he began his secondary education. But his mum claims bullies began picking on him straight away because of his brightly-coloured hair and willingness to learn.

He was bullied in Year 7 and then attacked in the street before Christmas last year. The latest incident, where a gang chased him into a toilet cubicle – forcing him to be rescued by a Year 11 student – was the final straw, she has claimed.

Ms Walsh, a full-time mother, said her son had been extremely distressed by the incident, which she had been told happened after the main perpetrator ‘had a bad day’. He was given just a one-day suspension, it was claimed. Ms Walsh said: ‘Yate International Academy has punished one boy, when a whole group were involved. ‘A day off school is hardly a punishment for what my child has had to endure. I think it is absolutely disgusting.’

According to Ms Walsh, she decided to take Tyler out of school and tutor him herself after staff suggested Tyler attend its ‘pupil inclusion unit’ for vulnerable students.

However the school said it managed the issue ‘in accordance’ with its policies and protocols. Roger Gilbert, headteacher of Yate International Academy, claimed Ms Walsh had misunderstood the situation. He said the ‘inclusion unit’ was simply a place where Tyler could go a receive support and tell staff how he was feeling [Big deal!], but that he will still be taught with his peers.

Mr Gilbert also claimed that Ms Walsh went to the media with her grievance instead of speaking to the school first. He added: ‘The unit does not teach children – it just helps them talk about what happened.

‘Tyler would be taught with his normal class and would not be separated. This situation is not as it has been reported. I was only aware of Emma’s complaints after I was contacted by the press about it. ‘As far as I was aware Tyler was a happy boy – I speak to him most days. I am fully satisfied that everything we have done has been done in accordance with our practices and procedures.’

Ms Walsh is also upset that the academy refused to send work for Tyler to do at home until he was able to start at a new school – claiming they are ‘punishing him’. She said the academy told her it would not send work home for Tyler because it was felt that this would be condoning his absence.

Ms Walsh, who also has a 15-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter, called for the school’s anti-bullying policies to be toughened up.

She said she had complained to education watchdog Ofsted about the matter.

SOURCE

One of the great cathedrals of Global Warming — Britain’s Met Office — pooh poohs the effect of falling solar output

They appear to be considering total irradiance only. Despite their great reliance on “multipliers” in CO2 theory, they overlook multipliers of solar changes — such as Svensmark’s demonstration of the effect on clouds. And their whole edifice is built on the demonstrably wrong claim that increasing atmospheric CO2 increases terrestrial temperatures.

The Met office is such a failure at prediction that they have given up trying to forecsast seasons ahead. Piers Corbyn, by contrast is a successful long-range weather forecaster so his scathing dismissal of the Met Office assessment is clearly from someone who really does understand what is going on. I append it at the bottom of the article below

New research has found that solar output is likely to reduce over the next 90 years but that will not substantially delay expected increases in global temperatures caused by greenhouse gases.

Carried out by the Met Office and the University of Reading, the study establishes the most likely changes in the Sun’s activity and looks at how this could affect near-surface temperatures on Earth.

It found that the most likely outcome was that the Sun’s output would decrease up to 2100, but this would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08 °C. This compares to an expected warming of about 2.5 °C over the same period due to greenhouse gases (according to the IPCC’s B2 scenario for greenhouse gas emissions that does not involve efforts to mitigate emissions).

Gareth Jones, a climate change detection scientist with the Met Office, said: “This research shows that the most likely change in the Sun’s output will not have a big impact on global temperatures or do much to slow the warming we expect from greenhouse gases.

“It’s important to note this study is based on a single climate model, rather than multiple models which would capture more of the uncertainties in the climate system.”

The study also showed that if solar output reduced below that seen in the Maunder Minimum – a period between 1645 and 1715 when solar activity was at its lowest observed level – the global temperature reduction would be 0.13C.

Peter Stott, who also worked on the research for the Met Office, said: “Our findings suggest that a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases on global temperatures in the 21st Century.”

During the 20th Century solar activity increased to a ‘grand maximum’ and recent studies have suggested this level of activity is at or nearing its end.

Mike Lockwood, an expert in solar studies at the University of Reading, used this as a starting point for looking at the most probable changes in the Sun’s activity over the 21st Century.

Met Office scientists then placed the projections into one climate model to see how they may impact temperatures.

Professor Lockwood said: “The 11-year solar cycle of waxing and waning sunspot numbers is perhaps the best known way the Sun changes, but longer term changes in its brightness are more important for possible influences on climate.

“The most likely scenario is that we’ll see an overall reduction of the Sun’s activity compared to the 20th Century, such that solar outputs drop to the values of the Dalton Minimum (around 1820). The probability of activity dropping as low as the Maunder Minimum – or indeed returning to the high activity of the 20th Century – is about 8%. The findings rely on the assumption that the Sun’s past behaviour is a reasonable guide for future solar activity changes.”

SOURCE

Corbyn replies

The UK Met Office and BBC promoted statement is extremely delusional and dishonest and a cover-up of reality. Full article: Decline in solar output unlikely to offset global warming

Their ‘expectation’ that the world will warm by 2C this century ‘due to increased greenhouse gas emissions’ is proven drivel based on their own failed self-serving fraudulent models.

They deliberately choose to know almost nothing about solar influences on earth’s weather and climate and create ‘information’ designed to deceive.

It is the largely predictable vast changes in solar charged particle flux and sun-earth magnetic connectivity which control weather and climate.

That is why we at WeatherAction.com long range forecasters

1. Confidently predict that the world will continue general cooling to 2035 – see presentation in submission to UK parliament enquiry into Dec 2010 supercold which we predicted –

2. Systematically predict and will continue to predict extreme weather events and situations many months ahead around the world:

The CO2 driver theory of weather and climate is delusional nonsense propagated by a self-serving failed sect. Their ‘theory’ fails to explain past weather and climate; all its predictions over the last ten years have failed and it cannot and never will predict anything.

The dangerous delusional CO2 sect must be destroyed before it’s diktats destroy the world economy and thousands more lives are lost from the chosen refusal of governments across the world to allow the application of scientific advanced forecasting of extreme weather which can help reduce disruption and destruction and save money and lives.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

jonjayray — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:31:32 +0000

The perfect storm that threatens the NHS

The NHS is facing an enormous funding crisis. To avert it, we must be more innovative in integrating our health and social services, says Chris Skidmore.

As Andrew Dilnot has stated, the fact that more of us are living for longer is something to be celebrated. But as the baby-boomers become the grand-boomers, with life expectancy increasing at a rate of three months every year, the challenge of the demographics cannot be denied. In this parliament, 1.4 million people will turn 65; by 2030, the number of people over 85 will have doubled. Already this is putting significant pressure upon the NHS – in the past two years, the number of patients over 80 being admitted to A&E has risen by 37 per cent to 1.2 million.

The need to find a way to care for our ageing population is immediate if the NHS is to avoid near-collapse within decades. Coupled with the rise in obesity – estimated to cost the NHS 25 per cent of its budget by 2020 – the increase in alcohol- and drug-related admissions, increases in levels of chronic disease and diabetes (which alone currently accounts for 11 per cent of the NHS budget), and the rising costs of medical technology and equipment, the NHS is facing a perfect storm, for which it is not prepared.

The problem is that spending has masked these fault lines for years, as politicians have focused on supply rather than demand. Healthcare spending rose from £38 billion in 1997 to £102 billion today. An extra £12.5 billion will have been poured in by 2015, and this is likely to continue to rise. Under current projections, the NHS is expected to require in real terms £230 billion in 2030, or twice its current budget.

Yes, savings can be made, and are – £20 billion over this Parliament, which will be reinvested into patient care in order to keep the show on the road. But there is a limit to what savings such as these can achieve: the NHS can only be squeezed so much.

Instead, we must focus on who is using the service. In 2007/08 there were 4.75 million unplanned hospital admissions in the NHS. This represents 65 per cent of all hospital bed days in England. And yet it is estimated that 60 per cent of all beds are occupied by elderly patients who shouldn’t be there, a situation that seems set to get worse as the population ages.

Of course, the situation Britain faces is the same for almost every Western democracy. We should learn the lessons of how they are managing to cope elsewhere. In the US, the non-profit health maintenance organisation Kaiser Permanente has a motto: “Unplanned hospital admissions are a sign of system failure.” In other words, patients who require such unplanned treatment did not receive the best care at an earlier stage.

With this motto in mind, the organisation shifted its focus is on care on the ground, above all integration of care: allowing patients to move between hospitals, where there was active management of patients; placing common conditions such as hip replacements on care pathways; making use of general physicians known as “hospitalists” to work in the inpatient environment. Above all underpinning Kaiser’s model of care was the idea of “multispeciality” – medical practices where specialists work alongside generalists. Doctors, rather than managers, take on leadership roles within these medical groups, and in doing so are actively committed to their success. Unlike the NHS, there is little sense of a false wall between primary and secondary care, since Kaiser’s care integration pathways straddle that divide. The results? Kaiser patients use less than one-third as many bed days than NHS patients.

Kaiser took their message to the UK back in 2003 with the establishment of their beacon sites programme. One such site was Torbay Care Trust, which, by linking their health, community and social care services seamlessly, has been able to reduce the number of hospital beds and associated costs to the NHS. At the same time they discovered that, for every £1 million spent on community services and social care, the local hospital saved £3 million.

Yet Torbay remains the exception. The rule elsewhere remains separate budgets, separate managers and separate staff between the NHS and social care, which since 1974 has been left in the lap of local authorities. The divide is a false one. What Kaiser, and in turn Torbay demonstrate is that the NHS and social care are very much two sides of the same coin. Neglect the one, and the likely consequence will be the other suffers: elderly patients crashing into A&E centres, taking up hospital beds when there is no need for them to do so.

While cross-party talks continue about how we can best care for our ageing population, and above all how we can pay for it in future years, the case for integration of health and social care has never been stronger. Currently less than 4 per cent of NHS and social care resources are used in joint-budgets which in turn drive joined-up thinking. This must change. To achieve this we will need a sea-change in the way we understand the value of social care. The future of the NHS depends upon it.

SOURCE

A THIRD of inmates at British youth jail are Muslims… and more convert to get better food

A third of inmates at one of Britain’s most notorious youth jails are Muslims and the religion is attracting a large number of converts.

There are 229 Muslims out of a total of 686 youngsters detained at Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution in West London, according to Ministry of Justice figures.

There are now so many worshippers at Friday prayers that they have to be split between Feltham’s mosque and its gym.

Sources claim that converts are attracted by the chance of better food and a more comfortable regime.

But there are also fears that some are being radicalised.

During Ramadan, Muslim prisoners are given food in separate hot and cold containers so they can eat what they choose at the end of their daylight fast.

A source revealed: ‘Over the last few years there has been a huge surge in those attending Muslim services. ‘The popularity of the faith has surprised people. We are seeing a large number of inmates converting to Islam.’

He added: ‘There is a difference between mainstream believers and extremists, but the fear is that some in the jail are being radicalised. ‘Others convert for protection or to have what they believe is an easier lifestyle.’

Prison insiders say most non-Muslims are locked up during Friday prayers because so many guards are needed to monitor the lunchtime service.

The Ministry of Justice said: ‘The Prison Service is committed to ensuring the religious needs of prisoners of all faiths are met.’

SOURCE

British millionaire wins right to ban official busybodies from nosing round his home

It is a country estate of such beauty that it inspired the composition of one of our best loved hymns. But the mansion behind ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ was the subject of an unholy row in court today over its modernised interior.

Conservation officials failed in their demand for access to Llanwenarth House to check on renovations and were told by the owner: ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle.’

Millionaire Kim Davies, 56, told a court how planning inspectors had made up to 20 visits to the country mansion after they feared the Grade II listed property had been given a ‘footballer’s wife-style’ makeover.

But he refused their request for an architectural historian to inspect the Elizabethan manor which is nestled in the idyllic Usk Valley in South Wales, and Brecon Beacons National Park Authority took him to court.

The home is currently for sale at £2.25million but work carried out Mr Davies has come in for close scrutiny.

National Park planning officer Clare Jones told the hearing she had visited the property at least 10 times and wanted to carry out further checks. She said: ‘The authority has now engaged a conservation expert who needs to advise us about the works that have taken place. ‘He will advise the authority if the history of the building has been compromised and on remedial work to put the building back to its original state.’

Mr Davies, a builder and car dealer, bought the house for £675,000 in 2007 and has since spent more than £1million on it. He admits that a new kitchen and bathrooms have been installed but claims the work falls outside the restrictions on listed buildings.

Planning officials were called in after it was compared to a ‘footballer’s wife monstrosity’ which may have damaged the historic gem and an injunction was taken out to stop further work.

Mr Davies told magistrates in Abergavenny that he had always complied with the regular inspections by the National Park officials. But he opposed the application for a warrant to enter the property saying: ‘Enough is enough.’ He continued: ‘I have to take a stand. No further work has taken place since their last visit. ‘My sister is suffering from cancer and is convalescing at my home at the moment. ‘They have been there up to 20 times and I’m not prepared to let them come again.’

Dr Charles Mynor, representing Mr Davies, told the hearing: ‘There is no evidence of any new works or that anything extra has happened. ‘It seems that the National Park are coming back for another bite of a cherry that has already been bitten on many occasions.’

The magistrates refused to grant the Brecon Beacons National Park a warrant to enter the property and awarded £500 costs to Mr Davies.

Chairman of the bench Dr Christopher Rowlands told the court: ‘Mr Davies has said under oath that no further work has been carried out on the property and on those grounds the application is refused.’

After the case, Mr Davies said: ‘I have always welcomed the National Park people when they have visited my home. ‘But it is my home and there has to be a limit to the number of times they want to have a look around. ‘I would get a letter one day saying they were coming the next. I opposed the warrant because quite simply enough is enough.

‘An Englishman’s home is his castle – only in this case it’s a Welshman’s home.’

Photographs used by the estate agent show the inside of the seven-bedroom house has changed considerably since the time of Mrs Alexander’s visit.

The kitchen has a large chandelier and granite tops while the bathroom boasts an ornamental Jacuzzi bath, and there is nothing Mrs Alexander would recognise about the high-ceilinged cinema room.

The estate agent description states: ‘Much of its character still remains yet the expansive home also embodies great comfort and ease of living.’

But the refurbishment work by property developer has not won universal songs of praise. Before the hearing Monmouthshire county councillor Christine Walby said: ‘The house is an architectural gem and the park authority has a legal obligation to ensure that listed buildings are preserved.

SOURCE

A quarter of British children aged 10 to 12 can’t do basic addition and one in five don’t know the difference between ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’

Young children are leaving primary school unable to spell, add up or do their times tables because their parents are too busy to help them practise, a survey revealed today.

Half of children aged between 10 and 12 do not know what a noun is or cannot identify an adverb – while almost a third, 31 per cent, cannot use apostrophes correctly.

More than one in five – 22 per cent – could not use the correct version of ‘they’re’, ‘there’ and ‘their’ in a sentence and more than four in 10 couldn’t spell the word ‘secretaries’ correctly.

Maths didn’t fare much better in the survey by online tutor, mytutor, with more than a quarter of children being unable to add two small sums of money without using a calculator as they can’t do division and basic algebra.

Twenty-seven per cent of children surveyed could not add £2.36 and £1.49 to get £3.85. In addition, more than a third, 36 per cent, could not divide 415 by five and a quarter did not know the answer to seven multiplied by six.

Nick Smith, head of online tuition at mytutor, said: ‘Maths and English are key skills for children as they enter secondary school, yet our study shows that many are already slipping behind their peers and could be lacking confidence.’

The survey of 1,000 children aged between 10 and 12 found that one in four did not know their times tables, a quarter could not use decimal points and two in five could not spell simple plurals.

But the survey also discovered that most parents who are struggling to find a work-life balance spend less than 10 minutes a day helping their children with their learning because they are too busy.

Almost half of parents surveyed, 48 per cent, said they thought their child was worse at maths than they were at the same age and more than a third, 36 per cent, felt their child’s English was worse than theirs was at the same age.

Almost four in 10 parents – 39 per cent – said they spent less time learning with their children than their parents did with them a generation ago.

Only 30 per cent claimed to spend more time helping their child with their learning than their parents did.

And nearly six out of 10 parents – 59 per cent – spent less than an hour a week learning with their children – amounting to just eight-and-a-half minutes a day.

One in five parents spent less than 30 minutes a week learning with their offspring.

Mr Smith continued: ‘Despite half of parents thinking their children aren’t as good as they were at the same age, most parents only manage to spend fewer than 10 minutes a day reading with them, helping them with homework or doing educational activities at home.

‘Addressing these shortcomings early can make an enormous difference to a child’s school career, with tutored children generally making more than a year’s worth of progress with just 20 hours of tuition.

‘Hectic modern lifestyles are leaving parents with less and less time to spend learning with their children – whether that is helping with homework or other educational activities.

‘Many think that their child’s learning is suffering as a result, yet fewer than one in 10 of the parents we asked had used private tuition to give their children a boost to their learning – with many citing travelling time and a lack of suitable local tutors as reasons.’

Shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg added: ‘Clearly, as this reports demonstrates, there is still much to be done to ensure children leave primary school with a grip of the basics.

‘But the Tory-led Government is ignoring the warning signals in this report.

‘Instead of focusing on the 3Rs, they are cutting funding for programmes which provide one-to-one support for reading and writing. This means 9,000 more children will be at risk of falling behind this year alone.’

A Department for Education spokesman said: ‘Getting the basics right at primary school is vital. ‘That’s why we are placing such emphasis on improving pupils’ reading ability early on, using the proven method of synthetic phonics to teach children to read. ‘We are committed to improving standards in maths – bringing more specialist maths teachers into the classroom and focusing on basic arithmetic.’

The survey results come as a government maths education advisor has urged that maths be compulsory for the majority of students, no matter what they are studying, up until the age of 18.

Government education adviser Professor Steve Sparks argues that all students who continue with further education after 16 should also take a new maths qualification alongside their other subjects.

He claims that teaching post-16 students basic maths and statistics is vital for them to be able to compete in the modern world.

SOURCE

jonjayray — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:11:55 +0000

NHS GPs sent me away 13 times and dismissed me as neurotic. Now I’ve been told that I am dying of cancer

No scans. Scans cost money

A mother has been given 18 months to live after doctors failed to diagnose her cancer more than a dozen times. Ruth McDonagh, 46, pleaded with GPs for two years to test her for the disease but was repeatedly ‘fobbed off’, and dismissed as ‘neurotic’.

Medical records show she visited GPs 13 times complaining of symptoms before she was finally diagnosed with bowel cancer.

Despite being in excruciating pain, doctors told her simply to take warm baths or eat different foods. And when she became so ill she couldn’t eat, an extraordinary doctor’s note shows she was prescribed a herbal remedy, with the GP noting: ‘Admits is neurotic.’

By the time she was diagnosed in January last year, doctors found the tumour had progressed to the most severe stage, rendering it virtually impossible to treat. Now 4in long, it has spread to the bottom of her spine and is likely to kill her.

Her only hope is an operation that would involve removing the tumour with part of her spine, but she has been unable to find a surgeon capable of carrying it out. Her chance of surviving such an operation would be low and, if she did, she would be unable to use the lower half of her body.

Mrs McDonagh, an office PA from Enfield, North London, is instructing solicitors to compile a compensation claim against the NHS to help provide for her son Brandon, 11.

She said: ‘I knew the symptoms of bowel cancer so I went back again and again, but I couldn’t get anyone to take it seriously. I was just fobbed off. I was in such excruciating pain and I couldn’t eat. It was obvious that something was seriously wrong with me. ‘I feel I’ve been failed by the NHS. I might have been cured by now if I had been diagnosed when the symptoms began.’

She added: ‘Who’s going to look after my son if I go? It’s been awful for him. He’s having nightmares and even wrote to Santa asking for me to be cured. It’s heartbreaking.’

Medical records show Mrs McDonagh, a divorcee, first visited her GP in December 2008, when she complained of bleeding. She asked the doctor whether it could be due to bowel cancer, but was told it was a result of digestion problems.

Over the next two years, she visited GPs in Potters Bar and Enfield another 12 times, complaining also of bloating and abdominal pain – both symptoms of the disease.

In June 2009, she was referred to Chase Farm Hospital for an X-ray, which found several abnormalities in the bowel. But several days later, when she visited her GP yet again, she was told to take warm baths and drink warm fluids.

Iona Millais, a solicitor at Russell Jones and Walker, said: ‘She feels very strongly that she brought the key symptoms to the attention of the medical professionals. ‘By the time she was diagnosed, many of the treatments were no longer available to her.’

Mrs McDonagh has launched a website, www.helpruthie.co.uk, to raise funds and seek a doctor to volunteer to carry out the operation that might save her. She said: ‘If it weren’t for my son I might give up, but I need to keep fighting for his sake.’

NHS North Central London and NHS Hertfordshire, which are responsible for the two GP surgeries that treated Mrs McDonagh, said she should contact their complaints departments. A spokesman for Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust, which oversees Chase Farm Hospital, said: ‘We are currently investigating this case.’

SOURCE

British insanity: Local councils will be handed £5bn to combat obesity

And it won’t make a scrap of difference. It never does. Even when people do lose weight, they eventually put it back on — and more

Local government is to take back responsibility for public health for the first time since the 1970s and will be given more than £5billion a year to stem obesity, binge drinking and smoking.

Powerful new public health directors based in councils will be asked to transform the NHS so it focuses much more on preventing illness rather than dealing with its consequences.

Announcing the plans today, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley will argue that a decade of failure has seen obesity rates spiral – with more than a quarter of adults now dangerously overweight – sexually transmitted infections double and gaps in life expectancy between rich and poor areas persist.

Mr Lansley, who aims to create a new ‘public health service’, will say that under Labour, public health was seen as ‘something to be sidelined’.

He will announce that next year £5.2billion will be spent on public health as responsibility is returned to local authorities for the first time since 1974. In a speech to health professionals, he will also pledge that the Government will increase health spending in real terms each year after that.

From April 2013, for the first time the funding will be ringfenced, meaning public health cash can no longer be raided to bail out other parts of the system.

Public health is currently the responsibility of primary care trusts. But as these will be scrapped with the introduction of GP consortiums in 2013, it has been decided that it should revert back to local government – which is responsible for wider determinants of health, such as housing, transport and leisure.

Local government will devise its own schemes for promoting public health, though ministers favour ‘nudging’ people to make healthy choices by presenting them as social norms rather than Labour’s ‘nanny state’ approach.

One example was the use of signs in shops saying ‘most people who shop here buy at least two pieces of fruit’, a tactic which proved effective in trials.

Under the new system, local authorities will be judged against a wide range of measures including tooth decay in children and reducing the number of falls in older people, and wider factors such as school attendance, domestic abuse, homelessness and air pollution. There will also be a major push to promote breastfeeding.

Mr Lansley will say: ‘The job of the Government – and my responsibility – is to help people live healthier lives.

‘The framework is about giving local authorities the ability to focus on the most effective ways to improve the public’s health and reduce health inequalities, long-term, from cradle to grave. Moving away from an old-style, top-down, target-driven regime, and towards outcomes that we all want to see.

‘Some are straightforward and obvious. Others are more complex, maybe things you wouldn’t immediately think of. ‘But they all help us live longer, healthier lives, and improve the health of the poorest, fastest.

He will also point out that ‘2000 to 2010 was a decade in which public health was seen as relatively unimportant, something to be sidelined’.

He will say: ‘Obesity rates from 2000 to 2010 rose from 21.2 per cent to 26.1 per cent so now over a quarter of adults are obese; sexually-transmitted infections, after the steep declines in the Eighties to Nineties, doubled in the subsequent decade; and health inequalities persist, with gaps in life expectancy of over a decade between people born in the richest areas and people born in the poorest.’

Mr Lansley will cite last year’s National Audit Office report which was unable to conclude that the £20billion Labour spent on reducing health inequalities was good value for money.

Councils who succeed will be rewarded with a ‘health premium bonus’ to spend on public health in the following year.

‘I want local government to be bold,’ Mr Lansley will say. ‘Really push to make things better. The health premium will encourage that, rewarding local authorities that make a real, demonstrable difference.’

SOURCE

‘Breast is best advice is too posh’: Charity stops promoting it in ante-natal classes

A leading childbirth charity will stop telling mothers to breastfeed over fears its image is ‘too posh’.

The National Childbirth Trust will no longer promote the practice to all women in its ante-natal classes. Instead it will encourage those who have already decided to take it up to do it properly.

The change follows concerns that its ‘breastapo’ tactics are alienating some women reluctant to breastfeed, particularly among the working class. The charity wants women from more diverse backgrounds to attend its classes.

The NHS recommends that babies are breastfed exclusively for six months. Breastfeeding rates range from 90 per cent for more affluent women, to just over 70 per cent for those in the poorest social classes and only 63 per cent for teenage mothers.

It provided ante-natal classes for about 90,000 couples last year, 16 per cent of them free through the NHS. But it has been criticised for alienating women who decide not to breastfeed or those who chose to have a caesarean.

Last year TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp claimed that she and thousands of mothers were being made to feel a ‘failure’ for having c-sections.

Spokesman Anne Fox said: ‘We need to get the message out that the NCT is for everyone, not just for “posh” parents as some people assume. ‘We want to have a more diverse reach. We have always worked on word of mouth, but now we want the person who says “You should go to NCT” to be a pregnant 15-year-old in central Manchester. ‘Our practitioners and volunteers are training to support all parents; those from ethnic minority groups, families that are newly arrived and those who parent on their own.’

The NCT, formed in 1956, has 100,000 members, making it the biggest parenting charity in the country.

SOURCE

The hypocritical Milibands — Rather what you expect from the sons of a prominent Marxist theoretician

David Miliband takes lucrative new job with a Pakistan-based City firm backed by a Swiss playboy as brother Ed rails against Capitalist predators

David Miliband has taken a lucrative job with a Pakistan-based City firm which will push his post-ministerial earnings to £500,000 – at a time when brother Ed is campaigning against capitalist ‘predators’.

The former Foreign Secretary, who has picked up a string of highly paid positions since losing the Labour leadership battle to his brother, has been appointed as a senior adviser to Indus Basin Holdings.

The firm, set up last year to funnel investment into Pakistani agriculture, boasts a number of colourful backers, including a Swiss aristocrat playboy called Baron Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Mr Miliband, who will earn about £50,000 a year from the part-time position – which is not expected to occupy him for more than a few days a month – is starting to emulate the money-making success of his political patron, Tony Blair. And like Mr Blair, he has constructed his business affairs in a way that appears to limit tax liability.

Mr Miliband would pay income tax at the normal rate on his £65,000 salary for being an MP.

His non-parliamentary earnings, however, are paid into a company called The Office Of David Miliband Limited, which is subject to corporation tax of between 20 per cent and 27.5 per cent – substantially less than the 50 per cent rate of income tax for those earning more than £150,000. Last night, a leading City accountant estimated that using the company device would have lowered his tax bill by £127,000.

The accountant added that shares in the company were split 50-50 between Mr Miliband and his wife – a move usually deployed to ‘split incomes’ so both partners can exploit their lower tax bands to the full. Last night the former Minister’s office did not respond to questions about tax.

Earlier this month it was disclosed that Mr Blair’s firms had paid just £315,000 in tax on a £12 million annual income.

News of Mr Miliband’s latest job comes as his brother tries to turn around his sagging political fortunes by attacking ‘fat cat’ executive pay and joining cross-party calls for reckless former RBS banker Sir Fred Goodwin to be stripped of his knighthood. The Labour leader used last year’s party conference to condemn capitalist ‘predators’ who are ‘just interested in the fast buck’.

Indus Basin Holdings (IBH) was set up by Aamer Sarfraz, a merchant banker at London-based investment company Tigris Financial, to make money out of burgeoning farm businesses in Pakistan.

As Foreign Secretary, Mr Miliband had frequent contact with Islamabad – including personal visits – as part of anti-terror negotiations. Last night his office stressed that none of the contacts he made in his official work had helped him land the job.

IBH’s investors include Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. The 48-year-old film-maker is the son of five-times-married billionaire art collector Heini Thyssen-Bornemisza and British fashion model Fiona Campbell-Walter. Known to have lost his virginity at 15 to a prostitute, in his youth he was linked to the models Koo Stark and Baroness Andrea von Stumm.

Another IBH investor is Tim Draper, a US venture capitalist known for being an early backer of Skype internet telephone technology.

Before securing his new job, Mr Miliband had already amassed more than £400,000 from speeches, lectures and consultancy work in the past 15 months.

The jobs include more than £92,000 a year from the Californian ‘clean energy’ firm VantagePoint, £75,000 a year as vice-chairman of Premier League football club Sunderland, and one-off fees including £24,000 for a week of teaching at a US university and lectures in the Middle East at £25,000 a time.

After losing the leadership battle in September 2010, Mr Miliband opted to walk away from the party front bench. By the next General Election in 2015, however, he is likely to have secured his financial future, putting him in a strong position for another run at the leadership.

He said in a statement yesterday: ‘I care deeply about Pakistan, the development of its economy and its future in the wider region. ‘I look forward to working with IBH in building support and investment in Pakistan’s agricultural capacity and productivity.’ His spokesman said the IBH job had been cleared by the relevant Government’s Advisory Committee.

And Red Ed isn’t as green as his eco-bag proclaims

As he leaves for work, Ed Miliband looks for all the world like the eco-friendly politician he is supposed to be.

The Labour leader emerged from his house in North London earlier this month clutching a reusable bag bearing the slogan ‘My Green Bag’ – clearly advertising his environmental credentials.

But within seconds, Mr Miliband, who was Climate Change Secretary in the last Labour Government, was spotted climbing into the back of a powerful Jaguar XF as if worries over global warming were a thing of the past.

The Jaguar XF range goes from a £29,250 2.2-litre diesel version to a £63,780 five-litre petrol model capable of 155mph.

Last night, Labour defended Mr Miliband, insisting the car provided for the Opposition leader came from the same fleet used by Ministers.

The party said: ‘The car is from the Government Car Service. It’s what Coalition Ministers are given.

‘As it is with the official car service, they meet high environmental standards.’

The spokesman said that Mr Miliband was not always given the same car, but the models used were always diesel.

SOURCE

Evil British social workers again

Under the pretext of “caring”, they do all they can to hurt and frustrate people

An elderly couple were banned from going on holiday together after their local council said it was too risky. In an astonishing example of the nanny state at work, Norman Davies and Peggy Ross were told by Cardiff Council that they could not go on the planned Mediterranean cruise, just days before they were due to leave.

Over-zealous social workers claimed Mrs Ross, who suffers from dementia, was in danger of wandering off or falling overboard.

But the 82-year-old woman and her 81-year-old husband fought the court order and were eventually able to set sail from Southampton on the 16-day holiday of their dreams.

Despite the dire predictions of the interfering council, the couple enjoyed the trip of a lifetime and Mr Davies said the break had in fact benefitted Mrs Ross’s mental alertness.

In October, after the council learned about the £3,200 holiday the pair had planned, it tried to use mental health laws to prevent from Mrs Ross leaving her care home.

Furious Mr Davies, a former engineer who lives near Newport, told ITV Wales: ‘I’m with her 24/7. The cabin is a self-contained unit and we go down for meals together – she’s just never left on her own.’

The couple have been together for around 20 years and have often gone on around 30 cruises.

They were horrified when jobsworths at the council obtained a Deprivation of Liberty Safeguard authorisation and then applied to the Court of Protection for a declaration to say Mrs Ross was unable to travel.

‘They just didn’t want me to go,’ said Mrs Ross. She admitted she sometimes gets confused. but added: ‘I do look after myself, and we’re usually in the same room together, so he notices if I try to go out. It’s not often.’

She had been admitted to the nursing home in July 2010, suffering from memory loss, and her social worker claimed she lacked ‘capacity to make a decision’ about the holiday because her ‘ideas/beliefs are not based in reality’.

Luckily, Mr Davies and his daughter Gaynor Lloyd moved quickly and instructed a solicitor to challenge the order, with days to go until they were due to set sail from Southampton.

The case was heard at Cardiff Regional Court a mere three days before they were set to go away, and to the couple’s great relief, the judge ruled that it was in Mrs Ross’s best interests to go.

Judge Crispin Masterman said that even if others believed Mrs Ross’s decision to go on the holiday was ‘unwise’, that did not show she was unable to make it.

He said the social worker and care home staff obviously had her safety in mind, but were too concerned with ‘trying to find reasons why Mrs Ross should not go on this holiday rather than finding reasons why she should’.

The judge concluded that she did have capacity to make the decision and the couple sailed away on their holiday.

His lawyer said the victory revealed that the over-cautiousness of modern life had to be tempered with common sense. Lawyers from Essex Street chambers said the case highlighted ‘a tendency among local authorities to focus on risk-prevention at the expense of emotional wellbeing.’

Previous cases have seen councils and health bodies try to prevent a man having sex, force a woman with a low IQ to take contraception and even stop a man bringing his grandmother home for Christmas.

A Cardiff Council spokesman said: ‘The council has always had Mrs Ross’s best interests at heart and we worked with her to find an alternative holiday where we could be confident that the required level of care which she requires on a daily basis could be provided.’

Her care home manager said that nothing stopped Mrs Ross leaving the care home and she was ‘free to have a lovely life with her partner.’ But she said she was concerned over the 82-year-old being away for 16 days.

SOURCE

Oxford finalists are little better than High School, claim tutors

About a quarter of Freshers at Harvard are sent off to remedial English and mathematics classes so the blight of High Schools not preparing students well is not unique to Britain

They are supposed to be the brightest in Britain. But some Oxford University students show a “distressing” grasp of their subjects and the answers to their final exams are often little better than A-level standard, according to their tutors.

Some are unable to spell words such as ‘erupt’ or ‘across’ correctly and give answers that show a “worrying degree of inaccuracy,” according to examiners’ reports seen by the Daily Telegraph.

Academics said a culture of box-ticking at A-level had left students with poor general knowledge and unable to think for themselves.

One English examiner wrote: “We encountered a distinct sense of undeveloped critical thought, first year level work, or at the lower end of the run, A-level-style responses: information dumped but not tackled.”

A tutor marking Cold War history papers said: “The clotted residuum of A-level work was noticeable in a clutch of questions.

“Candidates would do well to abandon the assumption that they can use their schoolwork without significant addition to their reading and analysis. “The intellectual thinness and out-datedness on topics such as the Soviet Union was embarrassing.”

Examiners were delighted by some candidates, whose work was good enough to be published in academic journals. But they were scathing about large numbers whose answers were “dull” – or worse.

English papers carried “haphazard and random generalisations”, they wrote. Only seven candidates in a class of 80 studying Irish poetry could say which country the city of Derry is in, and “very few” could explain the significance of 1916, the year of the Easter Rising.

In answers on Jane Austen, tutors wrote: “There was too much simply bad writing, which was poorly thought out and critically inattentive”. Students’ knowledge of scholarship on Dickens was “plainly deficient”, they said.

Answers on Cicero were “tending towards the dreadfully banal” while Alexander the Great fell victim to “manifest guesswork”.

In answers on Old English, “names were badly mangled and often forgotten – the tendency was, if in doubt, to call everyone Aelfric.”

Modern languages tutors were no kinder. In German, some scripts were “depressingly poor”. Spanish words, including the names of authors and their works, were “consistently misspelled”. French translation was often “appalling”. Italian candidates were “undeniably of a mediocre level” and the worst Russian oral candidates were “embarrassingly weak”.

Tutors in many subjects complained that students had failed to revise properly, and instead memorised old class essays and regurgitated them regardless of the question asked.

Other candidates, meanwhile, were almost too clever for their own good. “Some tyro de-constructivists perversely feigned not to understand the simplest phrases and tortured their texts into contradiction and unintelligibility,” the examiner of a paper on modern poetry wrote.

But it was students’ “startling” abuse of English that shocked dons the most. Some could not spell ‘illuminate’ ‘bizarre’ ‘blur’ ‘buries’ or ‘possess’ correctly, with tutors blaming a dependence on computer spellcheckers.

Handwriting was so poor that “scripts from dyslexic candidates proved a welcome relief because they were typed,” one added.

“Examiners were once again concerned that students graduating from Oxford having studied foreign languages should have such a precarious command of their own,” one Spanish tutor wrote.

More than a quarter of Oxford students received a first class degree in 2010, with 63 per cent receiving an upper second and just 1 per cent getting a third. No candidates failed their degree.

David Palfreyman, Bursar of New College and director of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, said: “Kids are so constrained by being brought up thinking ‘I only do for the exams at GCSE or A-level what the mark scheme says I should do, I never think out of the box because I don’t get rewarded if I do’. What’s missing is the cultural heritage.

“You can’t assume that if you say to a kid ‘this is a kind of Micawber personality’ that the kid understands what that means because the historian may not have ever encountered somebody called Dickens at school.”

Professor Peter Oppenheimer, an emeritus professor at Christ Church college, said: “Any Oxford tutor will tell you that the standards nowadays forthcoming from schools are appallingly low, and certainly much lower than a generation ago.

“In modern languages part of the problem is they aren’t taught English grammar, so how should they learn the grammar of foreign languages?”

A university spokesman declined to comment.

SOURCE

jonjayray — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:44:30 +0000

Four patients die thirsty or starving EVERY DAY on British hospital wards show damning new statistics

Four patients are dying hungry and thirsty on hospital wards every day, shocking figures reveal. Dehydration or malnutrition directly caused or was linked to 1,316 deaths last year in NHS trusts and privately run hospitals.

The revelation follows a series of damning reports accusing staff of failing to address the most basic needs of the vulnerable, particularly the elderly.

Only this month David Cameron was forced to order nurses to carry out hourly spot checks of patients just to see whether they need help eating, drinking or going to the toilet.

And in some hospitals doctors have been forced to prescribe patients with drinking water or put them on drips to make sure they do not become severely dehydrated.

Figures obtained by the Daily Mail from the Office for National Statistics show that in 2010, the most recent data, 155 patients died in hospital from dehydration while a further 48 died from malnutrition.

A further 812 patients died with dehydration and another 301 with malnutrition, although the conditions did not directly cause their death.

Officials who compiled the figures pointed out that not all deaths could be directly blamed on poor care. Some illnesses such as Alzheimer’s or certain forms of cancer make it very difficult for patients to eat or drink.

But campaigners said that no one in this day and age should be dying hungry or thirsty in hospital, regardless of the circumstances. Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients Association, said: ‘These figures are a terrible indictment of our precious National Health Service. ‘They represent avoidable deaths. These people needed our care when they were at their most vulnerable.’

Michelle Mitchell, charity director at Age UK, said: ‘There must be systematic monitoring of malnutrition in older patients. From the hospital ward to the hospital board, everyone needs to take responsibility and help stop this scandal.’

The ONS provided figures for the number of deaths in both NHS and privately run hospitals where malnutrition and dehydration was reported as a ‘direct cause’ or a ‘contributory factor’.

They show that they are far higher compared to a decade ago; only 862 such deaths were recorded in 2000. The latest figures are slightly up on the previous year when there were 1,292 such deaths. But when the numbers of deaths per patients in hospital is taken into account, the figures for the two years are broadly similar.

Early this month Mr Cameron announced that nurses would have to undertake hourly ward rounds to check whether patients are hungry or thirsty, need help going to the lavatory or are in pain or discomfort. And last year similar guidance was issued by the General Medical Council reminding doctors that care does not begin and end with clinical treatment

Reports by the Care Quality Commission, the Health Service Ombudsman and the Patients Association have all highlighted poor care. In October, a review by the CQC watchdog found that half of 100 hospitals visited by its inspectors were not doing enough to ensure elderly patients had enough to eat or drink.

In Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, Worcestershire, doctors had resorted to prescribing patients with drinking water to ensure nurses did not forget.

In many wards nurses were dumping meal trays in front of patients too weak to feed themselves and then taking them away again untouched.

The Mail has long called for better care of patients in old age as part of our Dignity for the Elderly campaign. Last year we launched a separate appeal with the Patients Association which helped draw ministers’ attention to the scale of the neglect.

A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘Many patients who suffer or die from malnutrition and dehydration are admitted to hospital with these conditions and have underlying health conditions like cancer that make them more susceptible to these problems. However, every NHS patient has the right to expect that they are looked after properly in hospital.’

The spokesman said action had been taken to ensure nurses would have ‘more time to check that patients are comfortable, are helped to eat and drink, and are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve’.

SOURCE

How was he allowed into the UK? ‘Beast of Bulgaria’ with a reputation for slicing off ears is held by police

A notorious Bulgarian gangster who was one of the world’s most wanted criminals has been seized by police – after being tracked down to a gym in South London.

Shaven-headed Tihomir Georgiev, who was on Interpol’s ‘most wanted’ list, was suspected of murder when he fled his native country for London. The 43-year-old, a boxer and former henchman to a Bulgarian mafia boss, reportedly has a fearsome reputation for slicing off the ears and fingers of his enemies.

But after fleeing the Britain, Georgiev was seized by officers from Scotland Yard’s Extradition Unit yesterday at a boxing gym in Bermondsey, South London, according to The Sun.

The Bulgarian was still wearing shorts and fighters’ bandages on his hands when police led him away under a European Arrest Warrant, according to the paper

Georgiev, suspected of murdering one of his own drug dealers for disobeying an order, was part of a gang of criminals seized in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2010.

But before the trial concluded, he skipped his £20,000 bail, fled to London, and lived on the streets for months until the owner of Rooney’s Gym in Bermondsey took pity on him, allowing him to sleep and train at the facility.

Georgiev even took part in boxing events at the gym and his face was used on promotional posters for upcoming events.

The Bulgarian fugitive was able to flee to the UK as his home country joined the EU in 2007, meaning his background would not have been checked when he entered Britain.

A profile of Georgiev on the Interpol website listed him as being 1.78 metres tall, with greying hair and ‘black’ eyes. His place of birth is listed as Pleven, Bulgaria, and Interpol state he is wanted for ‘life and health’ offences.

A Met Police spokesperson confirmed a 43-year-old man is being held over a Bulgarian murder at a London police station.

Describing Georgiev, one source told a Bulgarian newspaper: ‘The Boxer fought his competitors with brutal ferocity. ‘He tried to expand his group’s scope. If threats did not work, he would quickly resort to the knife and physical violence. ‘Those who refused to work for the gang were brutally beaten.’

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Tens of thousands of criminals in Britain commit a new crime within a month of receiving a caution

Tens of thousands of criminals go on to reoffend within days of being let off with a caution. In one year, 21,000 offenders – including 6,000 teenagers – broke the law within a month of being given what is effectively a ‘slap on the wrist’.

It means that every day almost 60 criminals – a third of them youths – offend again less than four weeks after being let off for crimes from theft to violence.

The figures are yet another illustration of Britain’s soft justice system and will raise further fears over the ‘caution culture’.

Just weeks ago it emerged that more than half of those involved in the August riots had been let off with a caution for earlier crimes.

The latest statistics were revealed days after Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt called for fewer young criminals to be sent to jail. Mr Blunt faces an overcrowding crisis as prison numbers rocketed to more than 87,000 this week.

Last year police handed out 235,600 cautions to thugs instead of passing the cases to prosecutors to administer justice in court. Critics say the penalties – which carry no other punishment than remaining on their record – undermine the message that ‘crime does not pay’.

The figures revealed that in one year, 6,007 children and 14,994 adults committed further crimes a month after being handed a caution.

Almost a quarter of all under-18s given reprimands end up reoffending within a year. The average adult reoffender commits more than two offences after a caution.

The totals emerged after a parliamentary question from Priti Patel, a Tory backbench MP, who said last night: ‘This shows the scale of the problem ministers have inherited.’

The figures, from 2009 – the most recent available – show 17.6 per cent of all adults handed a caution reoffended within a year, as did 23.3 per cent of juveniles.

A total of 85,750 adults reoffended within a year as did 39,697 juveniles who were issued a reprimand or final warning – the under-18 equivalent of a caution.

Some 52,442 adults and 22,648 children reoffended within six months; 23,403 adults and 9,572 juveniles did so after two months.

Separately, Miss Patel found that every year, hundreds of adult criminals receive cautions despite having been convicted of offences more than 15 times before.

From 2005 to 2009, there were 2,347 occasions on which a cautioned adult offender with 15 or more previous convictions received another caution within a year.

Despite these figures, Mr Blunt said earlier this week he wanted to see fewer children being locked up, with more being told to say sorry to their victims instead.

He said he did not believe ‘offending should automatically lead to prosecution’, adding: ‘In some cases, particularly involving young children, restorative justice can satisfactorily resolve incidents.’

Criminologist David Green, of the think-tank Civitas, said: ‘The thousands who are reoffending within a month are only those who are caught – which will be a tiny proportion of the real number.

‘These figures show cautions are being inappropriately used. If these are career criminals, they should be given more serious sanctions.’

Last month the Daily Mail revealed 50 people a day suffer a violent or sexual attack by a convict spared jail in the soft justice system. Official figures showed every year more than 18,000 convicts given a community punishment commit a sexual or violent crime within 12 months of being sentenced.

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Dodgy British crime statistics again

They would make Stalin proud

The riots that left whole neighbourhoods up and down the country in a state of ruin last August were the worst civil disturbances for a generation. But reading crime figures released yesterday, it is almost as if the five days of widespread looting and violence never took place. Nearly half of the areas worst-affected by the riots saw crime fall during that month, according to Home Office statistics.

In Croydon, where a 144-year-old furniture shop was one of dozens of buildings burned to the ground and a photo of a woman jumping from a first-floor inferno became one of the defining images of the riots, police recorded just seven disorder offences.

Seven disorder offences. Rioting by hundreds of mostly-masked youths in the south London borough saw dozens of shops burned, including a 144-year-old furniture store.

The disparity comes down to the way officers recorded the avalanche of offences committed during the unrest. Some forces classified hundreds of feral thugs rampaging through different streets in the same city as just one incident of public disorder.

Similarly, mass looting in which one person broke into a shop only to be followed by dozens more was recorded as a single offence.

And not one force reported the offence of rioting, officially defined as ’12 or more people who are present together use or threaten unlawful violence for a common purpose’.

In a statement, the Home Office said: ‘It is important to understand the basis of crime recording to appreciate the impact of the disorder incidents on crime statistics. ‘Police record crimes according to the number of specific victims, rather than the number of offenders.’

But Trevor Reeves, the owner of the 144-year-old Reeves Furniture Store in Croydon that was destroyed in an arson attack, slammed the police’s method of recording crime as ‘crazy’.

‘You would expect a great big blip in the crime statistics after those five days of rioting,’ he told the Telegraph. ‘It is crazy to put down something like looting as one crime and is unnecessary. The whole world saw what was happening and to record it like this will just make them look ridiculous.’

Police in the London borough of Southwark recorded just one public disorder offence despite five days of unrest and 314 other offences. Officers in Manchester also said crime fell during August, despite recording 11 public disorder offences and 386 related crimes. A total of 184 incidents of violent disorder and 5,112 connected offences were recorded by police forces across England. Despite this, nine of the 15 worst affected councils recorded more crime in August 2010 than a year later.

The figures did show that knifepoint robberies rose by 10 per cent last year and that one victim is held up by a knife-carrying criminal every 35 minutes. Senior officers have warned the attacks are carried out by muggers determined to steal smartphones and cash.

Separate figures show a double digit rise in the number of pickpocket thefts – the biggest increase for nearly a decade.

Across England and Wales, robbery rose by 4 per cent in the year to September 2011 compared with the previous 12 months.

There were 15,313 knifepoint robberies in the same period – up 10 per cent from the 13,971 offences a year earlier, the crime statistics showed.

Around half of all robberies took place in London and the most common items stolen were smartphones, bags and cash.

The Metropolitan Police recorded a 13 per cent rise in robberies in the capital and West Midlands Police recorded a 10 per cent increase.

Former Met commissioner Lord Stevens, who is chairing a commission into the future of policing set up by Labour, said the rise in crimes against the person was ‘a bit alarming’. He said: ‘I’m not surprised. It’s really worrying. We’ve got to get on top of them really quickly or you could run out of control.’

The British Crime Survey, based on a poll of more than 40,000 victims, suggested a 5 per cent rise in burglary, and a 7 per cent increase in car theft.

Pickpocket thefts rose by 12 per cent to nearly 600,000, while garden shed break-ins fuelled a 15 per cent rise in other thefts of personal property. However, overall recorded crime fell fractionally. The number recorded was down by 4 per cent to 4.1million.

Chief Constable Jon Murphy, from the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: ‘While incidents in violence against the person fell, a continued cause for concern was the increase in pickpocketing, robbery and robbery with knives.’ ‘This has been driven by a rise in robberies of personal property and police will want to focus on tackling these offences and offering crime-prevention advice.’

Meanwhile, the number of murders and other killings rose by 5 per cent in the year to March 2011, said the Home Office. That is a rise of 28 – taking the total number of violent deaths to 636, up from 608 in 2009/10. The latter includes the 12 victims of the Cumbrian shootings in June 2010 by Derrick Bird.

Ministers are set to introduce a ‘tough’ law meaning automatic jail for anyone caught carrying a knife with the intention of using it to commit a crime. Currently just one in five of those caught carrying a knife is given a jail term. The rest are handed community sentences, fines or other punishments.

Policing minister Nick Herbert said: ‘Today’s crime figures cannot be used to show there is a long-term change in either direction. There are areas of concern and, as we have consistently said, crime remains too high. ‘We know good policing makes a difference.’

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Power to the people? British Liberals have other ideas…

As you would expect — JR

People sometimes accuse me of being too hard on MPs. Why, they say, are you so sceptical? Well, just look at what the Establishment has done to the election promise to give voters the right to sack their MPs in the middle of a Parliament.

Here was a strong idea, widely endorsed. Now it is being strangled.

Two independent-minded Tories, Douglas Carswell and Zac Goldsmith, went before the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee yesterday to cry foul. The Whips long ago gave up on pukka Mr Carswell (Clacton) and tanned Mr Goldsmith (Richmond Park). That is greatly to the credit of both men.

Both support ‘parliamentary recall’ – the term for allowing constituents to call a by-election if they feel their MP has erred badly. However, they loathe the way the Government is pretending now to fulfill its promise to bring in recall. A White Paper has emerged from Nick Clegg’s office. It certainly suggests something rather greasier than what was expected.

Many of us imagined an arrangement under which, say, 20 per cent of an MP’s constituents might have to sign a demand for a re-election, which would then be held if 50 per cent of voters opted for that in a local referendum.

Cleggy and his Tory ministerial sidekick, clean-fingernailed Mark Harper, had a different idea. Their draft Bill hands the power of triggering the re-election process to – oh no! – a committee of parliamentary grandees.

Madness. The whole point of recall is to empower poor, ruddy electors fed up with MPs for fiddling their expenses, reneging on promises, failing to attend the Chamber (Gordon Brown, ahem) or Heaven knows what.

David Cameron’s guru Steve Hilton was hot for this idea. Alas, it was given to mad monk Oliver Letwin, a minister who complicates everything. Then it passed to Mr Clegg, who must have thought about his U-turn on college fees, contemplated voters’ sentiments and done a big gulp.

Out of the Whitehall sausage machine we now have this White Paper which, disgustingly, would give the political party system all the power originally envisaged as going to the voters. Classic.

‘This is a 180-degree wrong proposal,’ chomped Mr Carswell out of one side of his mouth. ‘It has been messed up by the people in charge.’ He argued that under the Clegg idea, the party bosses would be able to threaten rebellious backbenchers.

Mr Goldsmith said the Government’s Bill was so terrible it needs to be opposed by the very supporters of parliamentary recall it supposedly set out to assure.

The committee’s chairman, Graham Allen (Lab), was concerned about elected politicians, who may already be too weak, facing constraints on their power. There are also worries that recall could be abused by pressure groups and vexatious obsessives. Mr Carswell met this argument by saying that the public are not fools. They would soon spot anyone playing silly games.

So what has gone on? ‘Sir Humphrey would like to keep the people at bay,’ reckoned Mr Carswell, a punchy performer and empirical thinker. ‘Most governments fear the impact of democracy,’ added Mr Goldsmith.

Some people recoil from Mr Goldsmith because he is stonkingly rich. Actually, he is proving a better tribune of the people than many MPs who are supposedly closer to their voters.

An academic from Reading University was wheeled on to provide opposing arguments. He was all in favour of more panels of the great and good. These people usually are. They seem to regard the populace as something unwholesome. The attitude of Paul Flynn (Lab, Newport W) to tabloid newspaper readers was, alas, similarly snooty.

But Mr Flynn perhaps had a fair point when he wondered if electors are sufficiently outraged by MPs’ misbehaviour ever to crowbar them out of office.

Do you feel you should have the right to bin dishonest MPs? If so, get writing to 10 Downing Street, specifically our ally Mr Hilton. Fight for your rights. The Establishment will not surrender them lightly.

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Named and shamed: Failing British High Schools that play the system to be exposed

Secondary schools that try to manipulate league tables will be exposed next week when previously undisclosed information is made public, the schools minister said today.

MP Nick Gibb today claimed weak schools that play the system by only focusing on pupils who will affect their rankings will be revealed in a new league table figures to be published for the first time next week.

Mr Gibb said that since 1997 there has been a significant increase in the proportion of C grades awarded because weaker schools had been given incentives to focus on them. He said this meant students who might have been capable of getting As and Bs, or E students who might be able to get Ds, had been neglected.

In the reformed league tables, parents will be able to compare schools based on the amount of progress made by the top pupils between 11 and 16.

Mr Gibb said: ‘The way school league tables have evolved over the past two decades can encourage a degree of ‘gaming’ by some weaker schools, desperate to keep above the standard that would trigger intervention by Ofsted or the Department for Education.

‘But the purpose of performance tables must be to incentivise schools to raise standards and to enable parents to make informed decisions when choosing a school.

‘We are determined to stamp out any incentives to ‘game’ the system whereby some schools focus just on those pupils who will affect their league table position. It is vital that all schools give every pupil the best chance to maximise their potential.

‘We intend to make available data formerly kept secret in the Department for Education. ‘For example, we want to show how well secondary schools educate those children who left primary school still struggling in the 3Rs. ‘The new tables will have a column showing the proportion of such children who went on to achieve five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C. ‘We can then compare schools to see which are better at helping children who started from this low base.’

The figures will also highlight how well a secondary school educates pupils who joined them as high achievers and will show how well schools transform the chances of children from poorer backgrounds, Mr Gibb said.

He added: ‘A key objective of the Government is to close the attainment gap between those from poorer and wealthier backgrounds. ‘We are giving those schools with more challenging intakes significant extra funding through the Pupil Premium – £600 for every child eligible for free school meals, from April.

‘In return, schools must deliver the same level of achievement for all children regardless of background.’ [In your dreams!]

The data will also show how each school performs in the EBacc, the core academic subjects, and only the highest quality non-GCSE and vocational courses will be included in performance tables to remove any incentive for schools to put students on to courses which do little to help them progress, Mr Gibb said.

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British student atheists under fire over Mohammed cartoon

We read:

“A row has erupted over an atheist society at a top London University posting a cartoon sketch featuring the prophet Muhammad having a drink with Jesus on its Facebook page.

A student Muslim group is demanding the ‘offensive’ image of Jesus and Mo having a drink at the bar, taken from an online satirical sketch, be removed from the social networking site.

The president of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society at the prestigious University College London (UCL), Robbie Yellon, has stepped down over the controversy. But the Society still refuses to take down the image – claiming its right to defend ‘freedom of expression’.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association’s protest against the photo has been backed by UCL’s Union. A UCL Union statement said: ‘The atheist society has agreed they will take more consideration when drawing up publicity for future events.

Source

BBC’s biased coverage of capitalism: “On the BBC website an interview was featured recently with the famous orthodox Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, who promptly denounced capitalism as if he had established definitively its inferiority as a political economic system. Is the BBC such an irresponsible news organization that it will feature Mr. Hobsbawm’s characterization of capitalism with no one who champions that system featured responding to him?”

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up — on his usual vastly “incorrect” themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

jonjayray — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:41:12 +0000

‘Extraordinarily painful’ death of woman who waited TEN weeks for proper treatment of severe burns from hospital

A mother who suffered severe burns while cooking has died after waiting almost a month to see a specialist. Shamim Akhtar, a 66-year-old mother-of-two, failed to receive the necessary care for her injuries at Rochdale Infirmary, an inquest heard.

She was admitted to the hospital on March 15, 2010, after suffering burns to her right arm and back while cooking chapattis at her home in Castlemere Street, Rochdale.

Her headscarf and sari caught fire and she phoned her neighbour Hamida Begum for help, the inquest heard. The wounds were dressed at Rochdale Infirmary, but Mrs Akhtar was discharged after asking to go home.

Two days later she was admitted to the hospital for an existing heart problem. Consultant cardiologist Dr Mohammed Khan said Mrs Akhtar’s wounds were dressed on the heart ward and she was prescribed antibiotics. But after staff raised concerns about the state of the burns she was referred to a specialist at Wythenshawe Hospital.

Wythenshawe burns consultant Jacky Ann Edwards said the wound was ‘incredibly deep’ and ‘extraordinarily painful’ when she saw Mrs Akhtar on April 12. Miss Edwards, who said there are new assessment guidelines in place since the incident, added: ‘Had it been treated initially within 48 hours it is unlikely to have reached that condition.’

Dr Sally Bradley, medical director at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, said: ‘We deeply regret and apologise that the severity of her burns were not fully recognised and that there was a delay in transferring Mrs Akhtar to Wythenshawe.’

Mrs Akhtar died from multi-organ failure at Wythenshawe Hospital 10 weeks after first being admitted to Rochdale Infirmary.

Coroner Simon Nelson said there was a lack of ‘joined-up thinking’ over the treatment and care at the infirmary. But he said it was inappropriate to reach a verdict of neglect because it could not be proven the condition which caused the organ failure had come from the wound or if it was already present.

He recorded a narrative verdict that Mrs Akhtar died from multi-organ failure caused by endocarditis and her death may have been accelerated by the infection and burns.

He said the severity of her injuries was neither fully recognised nor appropriately managed by Rochdale Infirmary.

SOURCE

Hospital shuts baby unit after infection kills three newborns

Three babies have died from an infection in the same neonatal unit at a hospital in Northern Ireland.

Staff are clearing the room where the infants were treated at the Royal Maternity Hospital in Belfast, after finding all three deaths were caused by a bacteria called pseudomonas.

Other vulnerable babies have been swabbed for signs of the infection, and the room will undergo deep-cleaning over the weekend as staff try to find the source of the infection.

Two heavily pregnant women have had to travel from Northern Ireland to Dublin to have their babies because of the deadly outbreak. The expectant mothers were due to give birth at the Royal Hospital in west Belfast, but were forced to endure the 100-mile journey after pseudomonas struck the neonatal unit.

The parents of the 23 babies left in the unit, which is used to treat extremely premature and small infants, are now anxiously awaiting test results. The mother of one baby girl said: ‘She’s just seven weeks old and was born at just 24 weeks, weighing just one pound seven ounces. ‘She has come so far, past illness and the fact that she could get sick again – we really don’t want to think about it.

‘It takes about 48 hours for results to come back so hopefully we’ll find out today.’ The bacteria can cause infections in the chest, blood and urinary tract.

Consultant Clifford Mayes said: ‘Where it is possible, we will transfer a mother and baby out before delivery to other hospitals. ‘The large area with 13 babies is being deep-cleaned. There are only three babies remaining in that room.’

The first baby died on January 6 and the second on January 13. The third infant died late on Thursday night.

Doctors first became aware that there was a problem with the infection on Monday night, after test results came back for the second baby. Mr Mayes said: ‘Every baby has been screened with skin swabs, looking for any evidence of pseudomonas. ‘It is a germ which can be on your skin and not cause any harm but with a sick patient it can cause very serious problems. ‘The babies now are being moved depending on results as they come back.’

Pseudomonas is not itself infectious but because it exists in water or moisture patients can carry it on their skin. It can be treated with the right antibiotic, but the third baby died despite the treatment. The bacterium infects the lungs of those with weak immune systems and causes breathing problems.

Belfast Health and Social Care Trust chief executive Colm Donaghy said: ‘The trust will be carrying out a full investigation and an analysis over the circumstances over this period to see exactly what did happen and if there’s anything else that we could have done. ‘Our first priority at this point in time is the safety of the babies.’

A large intensive care room which can take up to 13 babies is in the process of being cleared. The infants are being separated into small rooms and the deep-clean will be carried out over the weekend.

Dr Mayes said it would be some time before other information about the outbreak was collated, as blood samples take 48 hours to be analysed.

Edwin Poots, the Northern Ireland health minister, said the authorities were taking the matter very seriously. ‘It is important that we remain calm. Infection control teams are now in the process of trying to identify the source of the infection and minimise the risk of spread to other babies in the unit.’

Some babies may be moved to other health trusts or even outside Northern Ireland if the pressure becomes too great. It will take at least a week to find out if the deaths were related to different strains of the infection.

Between 3,700 and 4,000 cases are reported to the Health Protection Agency every year. There are usually fewer than 80 cases of it annually across Northern Ireland.

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There are 30,000 job vacancies in London but young Brits don’t have the right work ethic, says Mayor

Unemployed young people need to learn lessons from the hard-working immigrants who have taken their jobs, Boris Johnson said last night.

The Mayor of London said that the younger generation are missing out on jobs because they do not have the same ‘energy to go out and get them’ as the foreigners being employed in this country.

Speaking a day after youth unemployment broke records, Mr Johnson said that there are vacancies, but British young people do not have the right work ethic.

He pointed to successful sandwich chain Pret a Manger, noting native Londoners are rarely seen behind the till. ‘London is a fantastic creator of jobs – but many of these jobs are going to people who don’t originate in this country,’ he said.

‘They are hard-working, good people, and we need to learn from them and understand what it is that they have got that makes them able to get those jobs that young Londoners don’t have.’

Figures released earlier this week showed that more than one in five of those between the age of 16 and 24 are unemployed, hitting a total of 1.04million.

But Mr Johnson, who is hoping to beat Ken Livingstone in the mayoral race in May, said that there are around 30,000 mid-market and lower-skilled vacancies in London alone. He said: ‘There are large numbers of job vacancies. Why are young people not taking up those jobs? How can we help them? That is the key problem for our economy.

‘In this city there are jobs going. It’s vital that Londoners have the skills and the aptitude but also the energy and appetite for work as well.’ He went on to suggest that British young people do not have the same determination as many of the foreign workers in hotels, coffee shops and shops in this country.

‘Let’s talk about work ethic,’ he said in the interview with The Sun. ‘I don’t want to stigmatise young people because many of them do have the aptitude. But we need to face up to these issues. ‘In some cases it can come down to the fact that the jobs are there and people need to have the energy to go out and get them.’

Unemployment figures this week showed that the overall jobless total has reached a 17-year-high of 2.69million.

Mr Johnson also criticised unemployed graduate Cait Reilly who claimed earlier this month that she is suing the Government for making her taken an unpaid work placement at Poundland in Birmingham. He said she ‘sneered’ at hardworking Britons by saying the work was ‘forced labour’, telling newspaper: ‘She should not turn down the opportunity to do work of a kind that many, many people do and value’.

He recalled his first job as a trainee reporter at The Times saying he could not believe how hard everyone worked when he first started and insisted Miss Reilly would learn from her work placement.

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Britain pays more than £2 BILLION in welfare payments to foreigners each year

More than £2billion is being claimed in benefits by foreigners every year, including thousands of illegal immigrants, figures reveal.

The Department for Work and Pensions announced a fraud investigation last night after it emerged 5,000 illegals claimed handouts worth £42million to which they are not entitled.

Ministers acted after the first-ever study of claimants’ nationality, which found 371,000 foreign nationals are on out-of-work benefits.

The study by the DWP found 6 per cent of all benefit claimants were foreign nationals when the data was collected in February last year.

Of those claiming benefits, 258,000 were from outside the European Economic Area, which includes the 27 EU countries as well as Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

But a follow-up exercise found 2 per cent of all claims by foreign nationals were made by those without the immigration status to justify the payments.

The DWP said last night: ‘Two per cent of cases appeared to have no lawful immigration status and the legitimacy of their status for benefit purposes is being investigated.

‘The DWP is co-ordinating with UK Border Agency to review the small number of cases where it appears benefit is being claimed illegitimately. ‘Where this is the case, benefit will be stopped and enforcement activity considered.’

Employment Minister Chris Grayling said: ‘It is not acceptable that people from other countries can claim our benefits if they have not worked or paid tax in the UK. ‘We will root out those claimants who cannot prove their immigration status and in turn they will be stripped of their benefits.’

Immigration Minister Damian Green said: ‘These findings uncover a worrying issue we have inherited, which is why we’ve ordered urgent work to pursue claimants suspected of abuse and to withdraw their benefits if they cannot prove they are entitled to claim.’

According to the figures, 54 per cent of non-EEA claimants went on to secure British citizenship. But the survey also suggests many are moving to the UK to take advantage of our generous benefits system.

Last year £35billion was paid to 5.5million people in out-of-work benefits, including Jobseeker’s Allowance, Incapacity Benefit and its replacement Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Disability Living Allowance, Carer’s Allowance and Bereavement benefit. Of that, 6 per cent, or £2.1billion, goes to foreigners.

Under current rules, those given leave to enter or remain in the UK may be eligible for income-related benefits, including anyone granted refugee status, exceptional leave to enter or remain, or Humanitarian Protection.

EEA nationals with ‘worker status’ who have left their job but are looking for alternative work are eligible for income-related benefits.

Those who can demonstrate they are seeking work are eligible for Jobseeker’s Allowance.

Robert Oxley, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: ‘With billions at stake the proper controls need to be in place to prevent benefit tourism from swallowing up taxpayers’ money.

Taxpayers will rightly worry the rules designed to prevent benefit tourists are steadily being eroded by a meddlesome EU, leaving Britain to pick up a bigger welfare bill than it needs to.’

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How 500,000 British pupils dodge core High School subjects as schools sign them up for softer options

Almost 500,000 state school pupils are failing to achieve good GCSEs in core subjects because they are signed up to softer options by their schools.

Instead of studying English, maths, history or geography, science and languages – the bedrock of a good education – many are taking easier but less useful subjects such as media studies or sociology.

In addition, league tables being published on Thursday will reveal for the first time how low, medium and high achievers do in their GCSEs in relation to the results of assessments made when they were 11.

Primary league tables from December showed that tens of thousands of 11-year-olds who had top grades at seven then went downhill after being left to coast in maths and English.

Educational reformers are keeping a close eye on GCSE results in core subjects.

More than twice as many public school children as state-educated pupils achieve the Coalition’s new English Baccalaureate.

According to the Department for Education, 35.7 per cent of public school pupils passed last year. That compares to just 15.2 per cent in state education, leaving 84.8 per cent who didn’t make the grade – or 481,000 pupils.

The award is not a qualification, but a measure of how well schools teach core subjects. To pass it, a GCSE student must score between A* and C in English, maths, science, a language and history or geography.

Schools with low numbers achieving the ‘EBacc’ will plunge down league tables.

Alan Smithers, of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said: ‘The EBacc is the Government’s attempt to nudge schools into encouraging pupils to take core subjects.’

Because it was only introduced in September 2010 to include that year’s exam results, it is too soon for it to have had an impact on Thursday’s secondary school league tables.

Professor Smithers said these results would be taken as a ‘baseline’ by which subsequent progress would be measured, adding: ‘For the exams taken this year we will be able to see what the impact has really been.’

SOURCE

An uninsightful look at racist attitudes

Below is an academic journal article which claims that “racists” have low IQs. I append some comments at the foot of it

Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes

Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact

Gordon Hodson et al.

Abstract

Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.

SOURCE

What the article ignores is that the mental gymnastics required by political correctness are considerable. A simple soul who sees a lot of black crime is likely to have a low opinion of blacks and say so. But, as is often said, some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual would believe them. And concluding that chronic black criminality is all Whitey’s fault is one such idea. So all the study really shows is that brighter people are more able to absorb the counterintuitive but politically correct cult that the elite have made normative in society. Only simpler people take their views from observable reality.

And we must also note that we are talking here about ADMITTED attitudes. And where some attitudes are much decried — as are racially-denominated attitudes — the truth of any admissions can only be speculated on. It could well be that attitude to blacks (say) is the same at all levels of IQ but only the simpler members of society are foolish enough to admit what they really think.

I could go on but I think it is already clear that this study proves nothing.

Muslim fanatics who called for execution of gays face up to seven years in jail in Britain

Doubtful that they will get ANY jail — unlike the white holocaust denier who got 4 years

“Muslim extremists who handed out leaflets calling for homosexuals to be hanged, stoned and burned to death were facing up to seven years in prison last night.

The group handed out the material in the street as well as posting it through letterboxes in a hate-filled campaign calling for the execution of gay people who they claimed were at the root of society’s problems.

Ihjaz Ali, Kabir Ahmed and Razwan Javed are the first to be prosecuted under new laws against inciting hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.

Yesterday as they were found guilty at Derby Crown Court, residents spoke of how the three fundamentalists wanted to transform their small area of Derby into a ‘medieval state’ under Sharia law. Anyone who dared to question their extreme agenda was branded an ‘M15 agent’ or a ‘sell-out,’ they said.

Source

jonjayray — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:58:28 +0000

Lying NHS psychologist gets a slap on the wrist

A child psychologist who has featured as an expert on BBC’s Woman’s Hour tried to stop a father winning custody of his teenage daughter by falsely claiming he was autistic, a disciplinary panel was told yesterday.

Dr Ruth Coppard told officers involved in family court proceedings that Ian Watson had Asperger’s syndrome, despite having no evidence to back the claim. As well as Radio 4, Coppard has appeared on the Richard and Judy show and featured in other media.

She was found guilty of misconduct by the Health Professions Council in London yesterday after six out of seven allegations against her were found proved. The panel also ruled that her fitness to practice was impaired.

The allegations included informing a family court officer that Mr Watson had Asperger’s syndrome – a form of autism – ‘without providing any evidence to substantiate your conclusion’.

Coppard, an NHS psychologist who is based in Barnsley, had also diagnosed the teenage girl as having the same autistic spectrum disorder.

She made damaging comments about them both in a report commissioned by Mr Watson’s ex-wife in November 2008 and a second report for the family GP four months later. Coppard admitted she ‘crossed the line’ by helping Mr Watson’s former wife and taking her side in the custody dispute. She told the hearing: ‘I may have been seduced by the mother’s request, but I really believed it was important for people to understand the extent of her difficulties.’

Mr Watson said he had attended treatment sessions with his ex-wife and daughter but had never himself been assessed for any condition.

He claimed Coppard’s report misused confidential information, which left his daughter feeling ‘cross and emotional’. ‘I don’t believe at any time in her life she’s going to have the confidence to talk about her feelings with anyone like that again,’ he said.

‘I went there in good faith and revealed my thoughts and feelings. What I said was added to a long list of failings that were mentioned in court as evidence to why I wasn’t fit to have custody of my two children.’

Coppard made the claims about Mr Watson two years after treating his 14-year-old daughter for an eating disorder.

She even contacted the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service to make sure they took her opinions into consideration. She admitted breaching patient confidentiality, but insisted she believed it was in the teenager’s best interests. She conceded: ‘There are a number of things I should have done differently.’

Panel chairman Jacki Pearce said Coppard ‘conducted herself in a manner that fell short of a registered psychologist’.

She was given an 18-month condition of practice order, which means she will work under supervision and undergo training.

SOURCE

Hospitals call in Army: Staffing crisis in casualty wards forces NHS bosses to turn to military medics

A recruitment crisis has forced hospitals to call in Army medical staff to run their accident and emergency departments. The national shortage of ‘mid-grade’ doctors – posts between junior doctors and consultants – means some hospitals have 30 per cent fewer staff than they need, figures show. This has led to NHS trusts being forced to close units overnight because there are not enough staff to ensure they are safely run.

Yesterday it emerged that Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust has called the Army Medical Service to ask for cover to try to restore a 24-hour emergency service.

Pontefract Hospital A&E has, since November, been closed between 10pm and 6am due to a shortage of mid-grade doctors.

Around 12,000 residents have signed a petition pleading for Pontefract A&E to be re-opened. Meanwhile, Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust has confirmed that, until last month, doctors and nurses from the Army and RAF had been working in its A&E.

The staffing crisis has been blamed on soaring admissions caused by binge-drinking and patients unable to see an out-of-hours GP. Critics described the situation as ‘deeply worrying’ and blamed the Government’s controversial health reforms.

Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham said that in the past shortages would have been solved by Strategic Health Authorities, which are to be scrapped.

He said: ‘The dangerous decision to dismantle existing NHS structures before Parliament has approved new ones is exposing hospitals and patients to unacceptable risks. Essential tasks such as workforce planning across hospitals, to resolve these problems, have been disrupted. There is a loss of grip and focus at local level.’

Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who is MP for Pontefract and Castleford, said: ‘It is deeply worrying that two hospitals have had to seek help from the Army because of the shortage of doctors and the Government needs to explain urgently why they have allowed it to come to this and what action ministers will take to deliver the doctors we need.’

Dr Taj Hassan, vice-president of the College of Emergency Medicine, which provided the national shortage figures, said fewer junior doctors wanted to specialise in A&E as the departments have become increasingly intense.

The number of admissions has soared in recent years and he pointed to the binge-drinking culture, as well as patients not being able to see a GP whenever they want. Dr Hassan added that gaps in the rota were caused by a EU diktat stipulating junior doctors could only work a maximum of 48 hours a week

Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust confirmed two doctors and five nurses from the Army and RAF helped man Stafford Hospital’s A&E department between October and December. The trust has struggled to recruit staff in the wake of a care scandal which is thought to have cost the lives of up to 1,200 patients.

Professor Tim Hendra, medical director at the Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, said there had only been ‘very early exploratory conversations with the Army’. It followed a review by the trust, Strategic Health Authority and Primary Care Trust, he added. ‘These doctors would be trained medical staff not on military service who could provide temporary support with our staffing rotas,’ he said. ‘This is only offered in exceptional circumstances.’

A Department of Health spokesman denied there was a shortage of doctors at Pontefract.

SOURCE

Labour Party didn’t care who landed in Britain

Labour left our immigration system in a complete mess. Everyone could see that. Millions of people came through its open doors to the UK – sometimes in the backs of lorries, sometimes as students who never went home when their studies finished, sometimes as failed asylum seekers who were never asked to leave.

Hundreds of thousands more came from Eastern Europe when the European Union expanded. Other countries erected temporary barriers to immediate migration. Britain did not – and saw a wave of people come here to find work.

We knew all this when we took office, and we began work immediately, both to bring the numbers down and to tackle the organisational chaos. What came as a particular shock, though, was the way in which Labour had managed the interaction between our immigration and benefits systems. Quite simply, they had not linked the two at all. When parliamentary questions were asked about the number of overseas nationals who were claiming benefits, we couldn’t answer. The information simply wasn’t recorded. It was a scandalous omission.

The integrity of our benefits system is crucial to the reputation of our welfare state – to whether taxpayers feel that they are getting a fair deal. There’s a natural instinct that says that no one from other countries should receive benefits at all. But if someone works and pays taxes here, it’s not unreasonable that we should help out if they fall on hard times.

But we have to have a system that is fair and transparent, and which stops people receiving money that they should not be entitled to.

In the last few months we have been working together to tackle the problem. For the first time the Home Office and the Department for Work and Pensions are working together on this. We started with a programme of modification to our IT systems that means the nationality of all benefit claimants will be recorded when the new Universal Credit begins in 2013.

But waiting three years and doing nothing was not good enough. So we’ve done a complex research exercise to match information about people’s nationality when they entered the country with the list of people now on benefits. As a result we now know that there are 371,000 people who were foreign nationals when they entered Britain who are claiming benefits. The majority come from outside the EU.

We’ve also done a further piece of work with a sample group of 9,000 of those people to find out more about them. We’ve tracked down three quarters of them, and most have a right to what they are receiving. They are people who have settled here, either by becoming British nationals or being given indefinite leave to remain. Those people who are now British nationals are fully entitled to means-tested benefits. Those who come here for a limited period cannot claim benefits. But if we allow them to stay, the current rules say they can access our welfare state.

We’ve yet to track down the other quarter. There may be a good reason for the fact that we can’t identify the rest – there may be data errors in our different databases, like the spelling of a foreign surname. But equally, they may be an indication of a major failure in our benefits system left behind for us by the last government.

Either way, we will find out. We’ll be investigating the records of all of those people claiming benefits to make sure they are entitled to what they are receiving. We’ve already identified some with serious question marks over both their right to benefits and their immigration status. Investigators are calling to see them.

We’re also working on urgent plans to streamline the rules so that we can stop benefits immediately. Under the regulations we inherited, it takes nearly three months in a case like this. That has to stop.

All of this represents an almighty mess. It should never have been allowed to happen. And Labour should be embarrassed by what it left behind.

We’re determined to sort things out. First, by building an immigration system that is properly controlled and which people can have confidence in. And second, by building a new generation of data systems that will ensure that no one can come to Britain and claim benefits to which they are not entitled. It’s what British taxpayers deserve, and it’s not before time.

SOURCE

370,000 migrants on the dole in Britain

More than 370,000 migrants who were admitted to Britain to work, study or go on holiday are now claiming out-of-work benefits, according to official figures compiled for the first time.
370,000 migrants on the dole

The migrants, who can claim unemployment, housing and incapacity benefit, are costing taxpayers billions of pounds a year. In other countries, many would have had to return home after their visas expired or their employment ended.

The figures are likely to reopen the debate over the generosity of the welfare system amid growing concerns that the country has become a destination for “benefit tourists”.

In an article for today’s Daily Telegraph, Chris Grayling, the employment minister, and Damian Green, the immigration minister, say that the large number of migrants now claiming benefits has been increased by the “organisational chaos” of Britain’s immigration system. “It should never have been allowed to happen and Labour should be embarrassed by what it left behind,” they add.

“We’re determined to sort things out. Firstly by building an immigration system that is properly controlled and which people can have confidence in. And secondly by building a new generation of data systems that will ensure that no one can come to Britain and claim benefits to which they are not entitled.”

In the past, the nationality of benefit claimants has not been recorded. Ministers ordered a comparison of records held by the UK Border Agency, Department for Work and Pensions and HM Revenue and Customs.

The analysis found there were 371,000 foreign-born claimants for out-of-work benefits, out of a total 5.5 million recipients. Of these, 258,000 were from outside the European Economic Area.

Officials used data from applications for National Insurance cards, which require people to declare whether they are foreign nationals. Just over half have subsequently become British citizens.

People from outside the European Union can legally come to Britain to work, study or visit with a visa. If they stay for a certain period of time, marry or have children they can apply to remain permanently — after which they become eligible for state handouts. Asylum seekers can also be eligible for benefits.

European nationals actively looking for work can claim unemployment benefit. However, those from some eastern European nations can only claim after 12 months on a registration scheme.

In the majority of cases, ministers found that the migrants claiming benefits were eligible for the money. In a small sample group, details from a quarter of claimants could not be verified, while 2 per cent of them were suspected of making fraudulent claims.

Mr Grayling and Mr Green write: “We’ll be investigating the records of all

those people claiming benefits to make sure they are entitled to what they are receiving.

“We’ve already identified some with serious question marks over both their right to benefits and their immigration status. Investigators are calling to see them.”

It currently takes about three months to stop benefits in these cases and ministers are drawing up plans to allow the handouts to be stopped immediately.

The analysis found that the highest number of migrants on benefits originally came from Pakistan, Somalia and India. Bangladesh, Iraq and Iran also featured prominently. European countries among the top 20 for claimants include Poland, Ireland, France and Italy.

The figures will lead to a debate over whether people who had previously paid tax should be given priority for benefits.

Mr Grayling and Mr Green write: “The integrity of our benefits system is crucial to the reputation of our welfare state — to whether taxpayers feel that they are getting a fair deal.

“There’s a natural instinct that says that no one from other countries should receive benefits at all. But if someone works and pays taxes here, it’s not unreasonable that we should help out if they fall on hard times.”

They add that the system has to be fair and stop people receiving money to which there are not entitled.

The Department for Work and Pensions has not made any estimate as to the total cost of the benefits claimed by the immigrants. Nor does the research cover those receiving the state pension, child benefit or other handouts.

Jobseekers’ Allowance is currently paid at up to £67.50 a week. Incapacity benefit is worth up to £94.25 a week. Housing benefits are typically more generous although the Government is planning to introduce a “benefit cap” to prevent any household from claiming a total of more than £26,000 annually.

Mr Grayling also disclosed last year that the Government was poised to take legal action against the EU to stop more foreigners being able to claim benefits in this country under controversial “reciprocal arrangements”.

David Cameron has pledged to bring non-EU immigration “under control” and a target to reduce those moving to Britain into the “tens of thousands” annually is one of his main policies.

The Conservatives accuse Labour of having let immigration spiral out of control with hundreds of thousands of people, including many from eastern Europe, settling in this country.

Apart from their impact on the welfare system, ministers are also concerned about the number of jobs being taken by immigrants.

Other official figures show that up to 90 percent of new jobs created in Britain over the past decade have gone to foreign -born workers while levels of unemployment have risen.

The Government believes that improving the education and training of Britons, particularly young people, is the key to ensuring that they can compete for jobs.

SOURCE

Dear Nanny

Peter Saunders

In England, where I live now, I let a house to a group of students. In 2004, the Blair Labour government passed a new Housing Act which, among other things, required landlords like me to install a hand basin in every bedroom, ‘where practicable.’ This clause is now operative, so just before Christmas, I met at the house with my tenants, a qualified plumber, and an inspector from the local Council to determine whether it was ‘practicable’ to install basins in the five bedrooms.

I admit I wasn’t much in favour of the idea; it is an expensive job and I have visions of drunken students heaving basins off the wall and flooding the whole house. My tenants didn’t like the idea either. They thought basins would take up valuable wall space that could be better occupied by desks, book cases or Che Guevara posters. The man from the Council thought the new rule was ridiculous, too, but his hands were tied. And my plumber had to admit that, with a soil pipe immediately outside two of the windows, it would be quite ‘practicable’ to install basins in two of the five bedrooms.

So we all agreed that in two of the five rooms, basins would have to be installed to comply with the Act, even though it made no sense to do so. The tenants promptly asked me to delay this ‘improvement’ until after they move out.

At the last election, the Tories promised to scrap all unnecessary red tape, so I wrote to my local Conservative MP and suggested that this particular provision of the 2004 Housing Act might be a good place to start. She forwarded my letter to the (Liberal Democrat) Minister responsible for such matters (the Tories are in coalition, remember, and all the boring jobs have been given to Lib Dems). He has just replied to me.

He tells me that the law requiring a hand basin in every room is necessary ‘to ensure that standards are decent.’ The implication seems to be that, unless we are tightly controlled, we avaricious landlords will condemn students to live ‘indecently’ (in my experience, many students manage this quite nicely with no prompting from me).

I have written back to the Minister asking why he thinks a politician in Westminster is a better judge than the landlord who owns the house, the tenants who live in it, and the local council that regulates it, to determine whether or not a bedroom requires a hand basin. I’ll let you know if I get an answer.

Meanwhile, on the same day that I received the Minister’s letter, I had an email from a certain Ben Plowdon, who tells me he is ‘Director of Surface Planning’ at something called ‘Transport for London’. I don’t know Ben, but he seems to know me, for he addresses me personally. He writes: ‘Dear Mr Saunders, I am writing to both drivers and cyclists reminding them to take care on London’s roads.’

I can’t remember the last time I drove or cycled in London. Nevertheless, I was so touched by Ben’s concern for my welfare that I decided to write back immediately:

Dear Mr Plowden,

Thank you for your email telling me to “take care on London’s roads.”

Up until now I did not realise it was necessary to take care when driving in London.

I will do my best to follow your advice in the future – just as soon as I have taught my grandmother to suck eggs.

Yours sincerely

Peter Saunders

PS How many GCSEs do you need to do your job?

SOURCE (GCSEs are a middle school qualification, well short of a degree)

Britain’s Green Subsidy Farms Harvest £25 Million For Sweet F.A.

Wind farms are receiving millions of pounds to shut down when the weather is too windy, The Times has learnt.

Dozens of onshore facilities shared £25 million last year, a 13,733 per cent increase on 2010, after a particularly blustery year, according to the figures released by National Grid.

The payments to stop operating are made by National Grid because it cannot cope with the amount of power being fed on to the system when it is very windy. But experts and consumer groups have accused wind-farm operators of abusing the system by demanding excessive payments.

Ultimately, the cost of being shut down is passed on to households because National Grid charges energy suppliers, who add the levy to bills.

Wind farms already receive large subsidies from consumers because they cost more to operate than coal and gas plants but produce no carbon emissions.

In total last year National Grid paid operators to stop generating for 149,983 megawatt-hours, equivalent to 1.49 per cent of the total electricity generated by Britain’s wind farms. This is equivalent to one large onshore farm being paid to be switched off all year.

It is the first time that National Grid, a FTSE-100 company, has revealed how much it paid wind farms not to operate. Many of the payments are made to onshore wind farms in remote places, like the Scottish Highlands, where the grid has not been properly upgraded.

National Grid argues that it is usually cheaper to pay off wind farms on the occasions when they would be operating at full capacity than spending billions of pounds to strengthen these isolated parts of the grid.

On one of the windiest days in October last year, National Grid paid wind farms £1.6 million, or £361 per MW/h on average, about four times the price that operators would expect to sell their electricity, according to ENDS, the specialist environmental information provider.

Consumer Focus said that wind-farm operators should not be able to hold National Grid to ransom by demanding huge payments in return for not generating electricity.

Richard Hall, head of energy regulation, said: “If wind-farm generators are asked to cut production they will clearly expect some compensation. But to keep costs down for customers we believe this should be at a level which reflects the realistic value of the loss to the company, not an arbitrary level that the firms set themselves.”

Ofgem, the energy regulator, said that it had “long-standing concerns” about the level of payments.

Since 2007 the amount of these “constraint payments” to all power generators has doubled as the amount of renewables being built has risen. Wind farms receive a disproportionately high amount of these payments compared with coal and gas plants.

The size of payments will soar further as Britain tries to meet its target of generating a third of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind farms, by 2020.

Phil Hare, vice-president for northwest Europe for Pöyry Management Consulting, the energy consultant, said: “If wind farms are receiving much more in constraint payments than they would if they sold the electricity, they are making a turn they shouldn’t be.

“By 2020, because of all the wind farms which will be on the system, the ups and downs of power generation will be staggering and very hard to deal with.”

SOURCE

Now Brussels ‘brainwashes’ schoolchildren: EU accused of targeting pupils after handing out pencil cases bearing logo

This might seem like a trivial complaint but the EU is not popular in Britain. Only the politicians want it

The European Union has been accused of trying to ‘brainwash’ children after pupils all over the country were given pencil cases with its logo emblazoned across it.

The brightly-coloured pencil cases featuring the EU’s 12-star logo were handed out to schoolchildren following an event encouraging teachers to forge links with the Commission.

The one-day conference was staged by Staffordshire County Council and was attended by 50 teachers to raise awareness of the EU in schools, it was reported.

However, critics fear the event and the subsequent gifts to pupils were attempts to brainwash schoolchildren into backing the EU. ‘Taxpayers will be shocked to read the cash they pay to Brussels is being spent in this way. If schools want children to know about the EU, there are plenty of unbiased resources,’ Andrew Allison, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, told the Express. ‘Teachers don’t need to go to expensive conferences, and schools don’t need to buy books from the EU bookshop.’

Meanwhile Paul Nuttal, Ukip MEP, added that it was ‘utterly wrong’ that an organisation representing a ‘highly controversial political position’ should be allowed to spread its message in to schools.

The EU Commission denied the pencil cases amounted to propaganda, or that the conference had a political slant. Instead event’s focus was to explore funding opportunities for the EU. The scheme was part of the EU Comenius programme, aimed at schools, colleges and councils across and supported by the British Council, an EU spokesman said.

A total of 438 UK schools were funded to forge links with European counterparts in 2011, the spokesman told the Express, adding: ‘The UK authorities vigorously promoted British involvement.’

Staffordshire County Council’s cabinet member for schools, Liz Staples, said the event – which cost £3,500 – was ‘purely educational’ and there was no cost to the taxpayer.

Staffordshire County Council is understood to have received a formal complaint from a resident about the conference, which was held in November, which its legal department is now looking in to.

SOURCE

jonjayray — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:39:17 +0000

Why won’t they help our daughter to walk? Girl, 3, with cerebral palsy refused treatment available at local hospital

A three-year-old girl has been refused life-changing treatment on the NHS, leaving her family outraged. Evie Tucker is unable to walk unaided as she was diagnosed at birth with cerebral palsy, a neurological condition which causes problems with movement and coordination.

In a bid to help their daughter, Evie’s parents applied for corrective surgery, but healthcare bosses have refused to fund the £23,000 operation, available just miles away at a local hospital.

The Tuckers are now desperately trying to raise funds for the operation, known as a selective dorsal rhizotomy, which could see Evie walk for the first time. Her mother Karissa Skidmore, 28, from Avonmouth, Bristol, said: ‘Without the surgery she will not be able to walk by herself. ‘She has a walker, which she probably manages about ten steps with before she gets really tired so mainly she crawls around.’

‘I want Evie to have the surgery as close to her fourth birthday in March as possible as she is not at school yet and it will not interfere with that. ‘I can see in her face how frustrated she gets at not being able to join in with her friends walking and dancing and will make a difference to all of us as a family.’

Evie was delivered ten weeks early after her mother suffered a fall. She spent her first seven weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit at Southmead Hospital, Bristol, where brain scans revealed that she had cerebral palsy. While she can do many of the things that her peers can, she can only crawl or walk a few steps with the aid of a walking frame.

But her mother came across a new type of surgery which could help her daughter get back on her feet. The operation involves cutting nerves in the spinal cord to overcome the tightening of muscles that makes it difficult for many with cerebral palsy to walk.

Previously the treatment was only available in the U.S. but Ms Skidmore was delighted when she discovered that a local hospital was one of the first to offer the service in the UK. The family applied immediately through their local NHS. However a funding panel refused the application stating that Evie’s case was not strong enough.

The family are now facing the challenge of raising the funds themselves.

A letter from NHS Bristol said: ‘The panel agreed that there is a small but significant cohort of patients who may benefit from this new developing procedure. ‘They had not been supplied with sufficient evidence to demonstrate that Miss Tucker has the potential to benefit over and above other patients with a similar condition for whom this treatment is also not currently available.’

The family appealed against the initial decision, but now they are focused on fundraising to pay for the treatment on a private basis.

Ms Skidmore, who also has a five-month-old son, Jack, with partner Dan Tucker, added: ‘This is a postcode lottery – they are saying the treatment is not available to other children but it is to those in other parts of the country.’

Since last May, when the surgery was first introduced at Frenchay Hospital, Bristol, 12 operations have been carried out by consultant neurosurgeon Kristian Aquilina, who learnt the technique at St Louis Children’s Hospital in the U.S.

As the only hospital in the UK currently offering the procedure, referrals have come in from across the country, with most being paid for by the NHS.

A further 14 children have been assessed by Mr Aquilina and had funding refused by their local NHS trust.

A spokesperson for the primary care trust said: ‘Unfortunately, the need for healthcare services usually exceeds the resources available. ‘We cannot always provide NHS funding for all of the treatments that patients request.’

It is estimated that 1 in every 400 children in the UK is affected by cerebral palsy and 1,800 babies are diagnosed with the condition each year.

SOURCE

Senior judge attacks UK border system after Lithuanian sex offender was able to enter the country

A senior judge has railed at the UK border system asking “do we let anyone in?” after a dangerous Lithuanian sex offender was able to enter the country and then rape a woman.

Lady Justice Hallett demanded to know if serious criminals were allowed to just “walk in to the country” after hearing the case of Victor Akulic.

Akulic raped a 40-year-old woman in 2010, just months after arriving, and then forced her to watch a recording of the horrific attack.

It emerged at his trial that he had committed a string of serious offences in Lithuania, including the rape of a seven-year-old girl, before arriving in the UK. However his previous offences did not show up when he entered Britain because of the poor information exchange between some EU countries.

Immigration officials here are reliant on individuals owning up to previous offences themselves or their home nation passing on details to the police.

But despite her concerns, Lady Justice Hallett reduced Akulic’s life sentence to an indeterminate sentence for public protection.

Hearing the appeal, the judge asked Akulic’s barrister, Catherine Purnell, how he was allowed to enter the UK with such a serious conviction to his name. She said: “He comes into this country with a conviction for raping a child. Do we let in just anyone, even if they have such a serious conviction?”

When Ms Purnell said Akulic is a Lithuanian national and Lithuania is now part of the European Union, Lady Justice Hallett retorted: “I appreciate that, but do we have to take in anybody, even if they have a conviction for raping a child.”

Ms Purnell replied: “I’m afraid I don’t know about that; it may be that if the authorities had known about that then something may have been done earlier. “I do know it was very difficult for the prosecuting authorities to find out details of the offence.”

Akulic was jailed for life, with a minimum of eight and a half years, at Maidstone Crown Court in February last year, after being convicted of rape, assault and intimidation of a woman.

Akulic, 44, of Alexander Road, Sheerness, raped a woman in August 2010 and subjected her to three vicious assaults – including one in which he knocked her to the ground and stamped on her head – before trying to intimidate her following his arrest.

The court heard he amassed a number of previous convictions in his native country before he came to the UK in early 2010. In 1992, in Lithuania, he was convicted of assault causing grievous bodily harm, for which he received a seven-year jail term, and in 1997 he was handed a five-year jail term for another offence – which was unrecorded. He was jailed for eight years in March 2001 for raping a seven-year-old girl and was released in February 2009.

Ms Purnell accepted Akulic was a “dangerous offender”, but the Appeal Court replaced his life sentence with less draconian imprisonment for public protection and reduced his minimum term to seven years, after which it will be a Parole Board decision as to whether he can be released.

However, Ms Purnell said Akulic is in the process of applying for a transfer to a prison in Lithuania, and told the court: “Hopefully he will not be a burden on the taxpayer too much longer.”

SOURCE

Judge attacks immigration ‘merry-go-round’ that allowed Pakistani man to make 16 applications to stay in Britain

A senior judge today condemned the immigration ‘merry-go-round’ that allowed an asylum seeker to stay in Britain for a decade.

The Pakistani national was allowed to make a staggering 16 appeals or new applications despite being rejected at every turn, at an estimated cost to taxpayers of at least £250,000.

Lord Justice Ward said the ‘depressing story’ was typical of asylum cases in which ‘endless fresh claims’ were allowed to ‘clog up’ the system. He said: ‘This is another of those frustrating appeals which characterise – and, some may even think, disfigure – certain aspects of the work in the immigration field.

‘Here we have one of those whirligig cases where an asylum seeker goes up and down on the merry-go-round leaving one wondering when the music will ever stop. ‘It is a typical case where asylum was refused years ago but endless fresh claims clog the process of removal.’

The Court of Appeal judge rejected the man’s latest appeal and insisted he should now be returned to Pakistan. He concluded: ‘I would therefore dismiss this appeal. It is time the music stopped and the merry-go-round stops turning. ‘His claim for judicial review is now dismissed. Enough of the whirligig. The Secretary of State is now entitled to take steps to remove him.’

The 38-year-old man, whose identity is hidden by the court, first arrived in Britain in August 1998, and claimed asylum one month later. His claim was rejected by the Home Secretary two years later after an official rejected documents he presented as evidence as ‘false’ and found they ‘cast doubt on his credibility’.

The man claimed he was a member of a religious minority in Pakistan and faced persecution in his home country.

He appealed to a tribunal and lost and in November 2001 he was due to be deported – but this was stopped after he claimed it would breach his ‘human rights’.

At this point, Lord Justice Ward said ‘the merry-go-round had started’. The new application was refused in December 2001. The man appealed, and lost his case before an official adjudicator in 2004.

Recounting these events, LJ Ward commented: ‘Notwithstanding that setback, the carousel continued to go round and round, because, nothing daunted, the appellant had submitted a fresh claim.’ The new claim was rejected on October 1, 2004, but new claims were made two weeks later, and again in January, May and December of the following year. He was arrested in February 2006, but made another new claim, which was rejected by the Home Office in March 2006. But according to the judge, the ‘whirligig kept turning.’

On March 13, 2006, the applicant made a new claim for judicial review of the decision to remove him, which the High Court approved in July 2008. Lord Justice Ward said: ‘This was to all intents and purposes a new challenge, another ride on the roundabout. On my count, this was the 15th submission of a fresh claim.’

The claim for judicial review was dismissed, but the case then went before the Court of Appeal, leading to a hearing in July this year, and yesterday’s written ruling.

Around £100million is spent annually on legal aid for asylum seekers, but this does not include the cost of courts and tribunal system hearing the cases or the cost to the government of fighting the cases and processing the paperwork.

Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has pledged to end abuses of the legal aid system by failed asylum seekers.

SOURCE

More Grammar (selective) schools would put Britain in the Premier League

In Britain, you can be too clever by half, but there is no such thing as too sporty by half

Is Stephen Twigg out of his tree? The shadow education secretary is trying to get Liberal Democrat MPs to join Labour in fighting a change in national admission rules which gives English grammar schools the freedom to take more pupils. Twigg claims the plan will “expand academic selection by the back door”. Disgraceful! I mean, what have grammar schools ever done for Britain?

Er, unleashed the potential of the most meritocratic generation in our history? Yeah, but what else?

Supplied a rigorous education enabling children from modest backgrounds to compete with offspring of the wealthy for university places, thus breaching bastions of hereditary privilege and creating a more diverse group of people at the top of society?

Yeah, OK, but who wants more evil and socially divisive grammar school places?

There are currently about 12 applicants for each of the 158,000 grammar school places. At Wallington in Surrey, police were called to maintain order at an entrance exam when nearly 1,500 pupils battled for 126 places. No wonder. In 2007, grammar schools outperformed private and public schools in exams for the first time, and have kept outperforming their rivals.

Parents will lie, move house, bankrupt themselves with tutors and even engage in high-class prostitution to get their child a precious grammar place. Yet such is the ideological myopia of Mr Twigg and his fellow zealots that selection, even when it is proven to offer the only chance of social mobility, is deemed to be the enemy of something they hilariously call fairness.

Well, the other day I met a child who is going through the most brutal form of selective education imaginable. Matthew is 15 and he wants to be a professional footballer. At nine, Matt was spotted by a London club and was given a scholarship place at their Academy. Getting in, which was ferociously hard, turned out to be the easy bit. Competition within the Academy is relentless. Of the 150 aspiring youngsters, maybe only two will make the final cut. When Matt’s team travels abroad it is accompanied by coaches who spot future stars among dirt‑poor street kids. Matt is not only competing in the Academy against his British peers but the very best boys from Europe and Latin America.

It’s hideously pressurised and the prospects of achieving the ultimate goal are slim. Matt loves it. Piglet in clover. I have never met a happier teenager.

Now let’s imagine another boy or girl like Matthew. This child is also from a working-class background, but with a brain as nimble and special as Matt’s right foot. She or he is the stand-out pupil at junior school. Given the right training, their brain has the potential to do something spectacular, but it can’t be singled out from the rest. He or she will not be stimulated by the ability of other similarly talented kids in an institution dedicated to nurturing the professors or inventors of the future.

For, verily, it has been decreed that selection according to nimble feet or muscular arms or dancing grace or vocal ability is permissible and selection according to intelligence is wrong. In Britain, you can be too clever by half, but there is no such thing as too sporty by half. Unthinkable, isn’t it?

You may have noticed that, as a result of these contrasting ethos – Darwinian selection in soccer, denial of the fittest in schools – we have tumbled down the international Premier League table to 17th in reading and 24th in maths, but are rather good at football. If school was a football club, it would be time to call in Martin O’Neill (himself the brilliant product of one of Northern Ireland’s 69 grammar schools).

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the new head of Ofsted and, I very much hope, education’s answer to the Sunderland manager, said this week that more than a million youngsters are trapped in “coasting” schools. Coasting schools are to good schools what Billericay Five A Side is to Manchester United. Sir Michael is abolishing Ofsted’s “Satisfactory” rating, beneath whose euphemistic cloak has been hidden all manner of shocking failure. Let me clarify. Schools rated Outstanding by Ofsted are generally pretty good, though an astonishing 53 per cent of those schools achieved that rating without being outstanding in teaching and learning. What are they brilliant at, then – recycling? Knifelessness? Schools rated Good by Ofsted are usually not too bad and as for Satisfactory schools, well, carry a pepper spray. In an age of slippery, relative standards, grammar schools remain a rock of excellence.

Still, Stephen Twigg is right about one thing. There should be no more academic selection by the back door. Too right. Let there be selection by the front door. We should send out search parties to liberate every bright kid trapped in a “satisfactory” school.

Recently, in BBC4’s The Grammar School: A Secret History, Michael Portillo, the son of a Spanish immigrant, recalled a reunion at his alma mater, the fiercely competitive Harrow County School for Boys. Sadly, one old boy was unable to attend, but at least he had a good excuse. Paul Nurse was in Sweden collecting the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Raised in Wembley by his grandparents – granddad was a mechanic at the Heinz factory, nanna a cleaner – Sir Paul is a prime example of what selective education can do for a child’s life chances.

Is there a small boy in 2012 living in a poor home who is going to grow up to be President of the Royal Society and a Nobel Laureate? Without a grammar school education to drive him on and make him take those difficult science A levels, there’s not a hope in hell.

There is, however, one chance for that boy to go to a place of fierce competition and unapologetic excellence. If, that is, he is gifted and talented. With a ball.

SOURCE

Dear Nanny

Peter Saunders

I can’t remember the last time I drove or cycled in London. Nevertheless, I was so touched by Ben’s concern for my welfare that I decided to write back immediately:

Dear Mr Plowden,

Thank you for your email telling me to “take care on London’s roads.”

Up until now I did not realise it was necessary to take care when driving in London.

I will do my best to follow your advice in the future – just as soon as I have taught my grandmother to suck eggs.

Yours sincerely

Peter Saunders

PS How many GCSEs do you need to do your job?

SOURCE (GCSEs are a middle school qualification, well short of a degree)

jonjayray — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:39:41 +0000

Risk to patients left with no GPs out of hours

Patients are being put at risk because up to a quarter of out-of-hours GP shifts are unfilled in some parts of the country, according to latest figures.

A shortage of doctors deterred by long hours and poor pay means health providers are struggling to find cover — even turning to nurses to fill the gaps in some cases, according to an investigation by Pulse magazine. Doctors are paid between £50 and £120 for an out-of-hours shift.

GPs reported that out-of-hours providers were leaving gaps in rotas. There was a particular shortage in the east of England where, in the wake of the scandal involving Daniel Ubani, it was stipulated that only local GPs could work out of hours. On his first shift in 2008, the German doctor gave a patient in Cambridgeshire a fatal overdose.

In Suffolk, the proportion of unfilled shifts at the out-of-hours service run by the agency Harmoni was 25 per cent last June and has not fallen below 13 per cent since the introduction of the new NHS East of England policy in October 2010.

NHS Great Yarmouth and Waveney reported that 29 per cent of shifts were partly or totally unfilled last September, although this has improved. Among 250 GPs responding to a Pulse survey, almost half reported their out-of-hours provider was struggling to fill shifts.

Andrew Gardner, the chief executive of Harmoni, said: “The key to providing first class out-of-hours services is assessing whether the demand of patients is being met through good overall performance against national standards, not through the number of unfilled vacancies.”

Dr Simon Poole, a GP in Histon, Cambs, and deputy chairman of the GP Committee’s commissioning and service development subcommittee, said: “If doctors are absent, you have to be concerned about safety.”

Richard Hoey, the editor of Pulse, said: “At the end of the day the problem comes down to money. The government grossly underestimated the cost to PCTs of out-of-hours care. GPs work very hard and if you want them to also give up their time in the evenings and at weekends it has to be made worth their while.

“At the moment we are seeing nurses stepping in to cover the shortfall and they are being asked to make provisional diagnoses when their training has not prepared them for that. That is a worry and is not fair to them or their patients.”

Primary care trusts and providers contacted by Pulse denied patient care had been affected but some acknowledged recruitment was a problem.

SOURCE

Doctors may strike over cuts to their pension pots

Doctors have threatened their first industrial action for more than 30 years after refusing to accept cuts to their pension pots, which are each worth an average of £1.7million.

The British Medical Association, which represents 130,000 doctors and medical students, said two thirds of its members support industrial action which could cripple hospitals and GP surgeries throughout the country.

The association rejected cuts to doctor’s pensions despite warning that some hospitals are so financially stretched that patient safety can no longer be guaranteed and that “accidents will happen”.

Senior government figures said the reductions in their pensions were “modest” and in line with other public sector staff.

A government source said: “It seems a bit rich for doctors to be complaining about cuts and patient care when they leave the NHS as millionaires.”

Over the past decade, the average consultant has seen their pay rise by 54 per cent, with less qualified doctors enjoying a rise of 30 per cent. Their pay has recently been frozen, with the average GP now earning about £110,000.

Under controversial reforms introduced by Labour, they won the right to opt out of working at weekends and at night. They also enjoy generous final salary pensions, with figures released by the Department of Health showing that a typical NHS doctor retiring at 60 will receive a pension of more than £48,000 a year for life.

In addition, they receive a tax-free lump sum of around £143,000 on retirement, a pension scheme that would cost more than £1.7million in the private sector.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said the current situation was “unsustainable”. “Doctors and consultants who are among the highest earners in the NHS have benefited hugely from the current final salary scheme arrangements compared to other staff groups,” the spokesman said.

“The reforms to public service pensions will ensure that NHS pensions remain amongst the very best. The Government has made clear that this is our final position on the main elements of scheme design — it is a fair and affordable deal for both staff and the taxpayer.”

Dan Poulter, a Conservative MP and hospital doctor, said: “As a member of the BMA, I am disappointed by this hypocrisy. On the one hand we are hearing of the difficulty of finding the efficiencies the NHS needs. Yet, on the other, we have unreasonable opposition to reforms to pay and pensions that are both necessary and fair.”

Under the proposals, doctors will have to work beyond 60 to earn the same pension, although anyone within 10 years of retirement will not see any change in their situation.

The BMA said the reforms meant doctors would also have to sacrifice some of their pension in exchange for a lump sum payment on their retirement. It added that its members felt “betrayed” by the pension reforms, raising the spectre of its first unrest since 1975.

Results of a UK-wide survey of its members found that eight in 10 doctors rejected the pension proposals, with two thirds backing industrial action.

Only 20 per cent said they would be willing to strike, with the majority backing a campaign of action short of striking, such as a work-to-rule protest. More than of a third of doctors aged 50 or over said they intended to retire early if the changes went ahead.

A spokesman for the BMA added: “The strength and scale of feeling among doctors are abundantly clear. They feel let down and betrayed, and for many this is the final straw.”

Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the BMA council, says in an interview with today’s New Statesman that efficiency savings are undermining patient care. He warns that they will lead to a repeat of the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal, where up to 1,200 patients died because cutting costs and hitting targets was prioritised above patient care. “You get trusts that try to stretch rotas or stretch the staffing of wards too thinly — well, then accidents will happen,” Dr Meldrum warns.

Ministers are close to a confrontation with several of the most high-profile organisations representing medical staff.

The Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives last night announced they have joined the BMA and the Royal College of General Practitioners in outright opposition to the Government’s reforms to the NHS.

SOURCE

British plans for green energy drive ‘will cost families £400 a year by 2020′

Plans for a massive expansion of renewable energy will cost families an average of £400 a year each, a report warned last night.

It accuses Energy Secretary Chris Huhne of ‘misleading’ the public by suggesting energy costs could be lower as a result of the Government’s drive for green power.

It said official estimates had grossly underestimated the impact on families by leaving out much of the huge taxpayer subsidy for wind farms and other costly forms of renewable energy.

Mr Huhne told MPs in November that the Government’s green energy policies would reduce average household bills by 7 per cent – equal to about £94 a year.

Businesses will see average bills rise by 19 per cent. Government officials last night said ministers stood by the estimate.

But the study by the respected think-tank Policy Exchange says the Government’s figures are based on huge assumptions that households will cut their energy use. It suggests the overall impact of subsidies for green energy will cost the average family £400 a year by 2020 – the equivalent of adding 2.5p to the VAT rate.

The huge cost will raise fresh questions about the Government’s strategy of focusing resources on an expensive network of offshore wind farms in an effort to meet tough EU carbon emission targets.

Simon Less, of Policy Exchange, called on ministers to be ‘more transparent’.

The think-tank, which has close links to the Conservative Party, believes the Government’s green targets should be ‘renegotiated’ with Brussels, and that the private sector should be given incentives to come up with cheaper ways of cutting carbon emissions.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said £400 was ‘not a credible figure, and appears to be based on flawed analysis’.

SOURCE

The anachronism of public service broadcasting

In last week’s Spectator, Charles Moore bemoaned the dumbing down of BBC Radio 3. In this week’s issue, several letters to the editor make the same point. Now, you may dismiss this as the snobbery of classical music afficionados. Or you might agree that Radio 3 presenters are indeed ruining the listening experience by telling you how you should feel about particular pieces of music (e.g. “blown away”) and entreating you to to email, text or tweet about what you are hearing. Frankly, I’m too much of a musical moron to have an opinion on the subject.

What this story really highlights is the futility of compulsorily funded “public service broadcasting”. The point of public service broadcasting is, one would assume, to address some failure in the broadcast market – to produce and air content which benefits the public, and which would not otherwise be produced or aired by commercial players. But if you buy this market failure argument, you have to concede that ‘public service broadcasting’ is likely to be a fairly elitist project. The intention may be to bring high culture to the masses, but in reality you will probably end up subsidising the tastes of the relatively wealthy and well educated with a tax paid largely by those who have no interest in such things. This is clearly a rather perverse outcome.

On the other hand, if you “dumb-down”, if you chase market share with populist programming, then the rationale for compulsorily funded public service broadcasting disappears. By way of illustration, let’s look at tonight’s broadcast schedule for the BBC 3 TV channel.

At 7pm, we get Pop’s Greatest Dance Crazes, “a top 50 countdown of the hippest, sexiest, quirkiest and campest dance crazes of the last 40 years.” At 8pm, it’s Don’t Tell the Bride, a reality TV show in which a man gets £12,000 to arrange his wedding, but isn’t allowed any contact with his wife-to-be while he does it: “Four weeks apart will push their relationship to the limit.” At 9pm, it’s How Sex Works, which is a documentary about twenty-somethings who get around a bit. At 10pm, it is time for Eastenders (a miserable soap opera), followed by documentary Bizarre Crimes (self-explanatory), and a series of cartoons imported from the US. If you are lucky enough to still be awake at 4.25am, you get to watch Cherry Healey look for “essential truths amongst the tales of sex and debauchery to see if losing your virginity is about more than just having sex for the first time.”

Can anyone really argue that programming like that justifies forcing television-owners, on pain of imprisonment, to pay £145.50 a year to a government agency? It’s a rhetorical question.

Public service broadcasting is caught between a rock and a hard place. If it sticks to its ‘market failure’ remit it will appear elitist and lose public support. If it chases a larger market, it will undermine any reasonable case for public funding. Ultimately, public service broadcasting and the licence fee that sustains it are an anachronism – something which might (just) have been appropriate when we had two TV channels and limited broadcasting spectrum, but no longer make sense in a world of thousand-channel satellite television and high-speed internet streaming. With almost limitless choice available at the click of a button, we don’t need government to entertain us, inform us, or filter our cultural diets for us. Curiously enough, the way that technology has democratized the media means that democracy itself no longer has any valuable role in broadcasting. It’s time the BBC and the government realized that.

SOURCE

Church of England faces court battle by dressup queen who claims he was blocked from becoming a bishop

A gay senior clergyman who claims he was blocked from becoming a bishop has threatened to take the Church of England to court.
Church sources say the Very Rev Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, believes he could sue officials under the Equality Act 2010, which bans discrimination on the grounds of sexuality. He has instructed a leading employment lawyer after being rejected for the role of Bishop of Southwark in 2010.

The dean is one of the most contentious figures in the church. In 2003 he was forced to step down as Bishop of Reading by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams after it became known that he was in a gay, though celibate, relationship. The furore fuelled a bitter civil war within the Anglican Church that has dominated Dr Williams’s decade in office.

The dean was again a cause of infighting in 2010 when he was a candidate for Bishop of Southwark.

A respected theologian and former canon at Southwark Cathedral, he had strong backing from senior Church liberals and it was said even David Cameron was supportive.

But the Crown Nominations Commission, whose members are responsible for selecting bishops and include Dr Williams, appointed another candidate.

Dr John was said to be furious and his supporters’ anger was stoked by a memo by another member of the commission, the late Dean of Southwark Colin Slee, claiming Dr Williams was one of those who tried to ‘wreck’ Dr John’s chances.

Dr John has instructed Alison Downie, partner and head of employment at London lawyers Goodman Derrick, to write to the Commission to suggest it risks breaching gay equality laws if it is blocking the dean over his homosexuality.

Ms Downie previously acted for a gay youth worker who successfully sued the Church in 2008 after the Bishop of Hereford Anthony Priddis refused him a job.

It is understood there has been a lengthy correspondence between Ms Downie and Church lawyers in an attempt to resolve the dispute. No legal action has been launched but it is thought Dr John has not ruled out the possibility, although one source said Dr John suggested he would drop his legal threat if he felt he would not be ruled out for future posts.

Church lawyers published new guidelines last summer which said that under the Equality Act, candidates cannot be barred from senior Church posts because they are gay as long as they do not have sex.

The guidance added that candidates could be blocked if they were regarded as divisive because their views or behaviour had angered a significant number of their flock.

Ms Downie refused to comment last night. A Church spokesman also refused to comment.

SOURCE

Catholic midwives challenge British ruling on abortions

Two Roman Catholic midwives are taking a health board to court for allegedly failing to recognise their conscientious objection to supervising staff involved in abortions.

Mary Doogan, 57, and Concepta Wood, 51, told NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde they were not prepared to delegate, supervise or support staff who were looking after patients through “the processes of medical termination of pregnancy”. Their position was rejected by officials and they hope to have the ruling set aside in a judicial review.

The women claim the refusal to recognise their entitlement to conscientious objection violates their rights under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

They say they “hold a religious belief that all human life is sacred from the moment of conception and that termination of pregnancy is a grave offence against human life”. Their involvement in the process would be wrongful and “an offence against God”.

Miss Doogan and Mrs Wood, both midwifery sisters at the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, are seeking a ruling at the Court of Session in Edinburgh on their entitlement to conscientious objection under the 1967 Abortion Act. David Johnston QC, for the women, said the matter became an issue for the midwives, who were long-standing employees, in 2007.

They had both previously given notice of conscientious objection to any involvement in abortions and said they were not expected to participate in such treatment. But in 2007 the health board introduced changes that meant patients undergoing medical terminations were cared for in the labour ward, where the women worked. They were not expected to administer abortion-inducing drugs but management said requiring conscientious objectors to provide care for patients through a termination was lawful.

According to the court papers, Mrs Wood, of Clarkston, Glasgow, had to provide direct care to a patient undergoing the termination process, which caused her “considerable distress and anxiety” and resulted in her obtaining a transfer. Miss Doogan, of Garrowhill, Glasgow, has been absent from work through ill health since 2010 as a result of the dispute.

The hearing continues.

Last year, two Catholic nurses who had been told they could not refuse to work at an abortion clinic had the ruling dropped after claiming that the sanctity of unborn life was a philosophical belief protected under the Equality Act 2010.

SOURCE

School leavers better workers than graduates as universities fail to equip people for work, say British employers

One in five employers believe school leavers make better workers than university graduates, according to research published today. Over half of companies said that university graduates had unrealistic expectations of working life.

A further one in three believed that the education system was failing to equip young people with the skills required by British businesses, the survey by recruitment giants Adecco found.

Newcomers to the world of work were found to be most lacking in interpersonal and computer skills, while one in four employers reported a lack of basic literacy and numeracy skills among graduate recruits.

Adecco called on the education system, employers and the Government to tackle ‘substantial shortcomings’ in workplace skills.

Chris Moore, from Adecco Group, who surveyed 1,000 firms in the study, said: ‘Undeniably, Britain has one of the best and most advanced education systems in the world but it must deliver a talented, reliable graduate workforce that brings demonstrable value to UK plc.

‘On a significant scale, employers believe it is failing to do that. ‘Although extremely valuable, a strong academic record is no longer a sufficient prerequisite for entry into today’s working environment. ‘Employers now hold attitude and personality in greater esteem than academic or even vocational qualifications when assessing new recruits.

‘Collectively, we – the Government, businesses and educators – must work together and take full responsibility for developing skills in line with commercial needs.

‘Financial acumen, communications techniques and a full appreciation of the attitude required to excel in the commercial world must now form a core part of curricula.

‘We have to listen to employers who are telling us that our education system has to ensure soft skills are valued alongside an emphasis on academic excellence.’

SOURCE

Asthmatic children’s lives put at risk by ‘red tape’ as British schools banned from keeping spare inhaler

But the bureaucracy is adamant

Children with asthma are being prevented from getting access to inhalers in schools due to ‘needless red tape’, a leading charity has warned. Asthma UK said schools are prevented from keeping a spare blue reliever inhaler on their premises because they are prescription-only medicines. But this puts children’s lives at risk when they have forgotten to bring their own inhaler to school or have run out, it said.

The charity is calling for a change in the rules to allow schools to keep inhalers in their first aid kits.

Some 1.1 million children in the UK have asthma and just over 30,000 are admitted to hospital with the condition every year. There are around 1,100 asthma deaths every year among both adults and children.

A small survey of more than 200 youngsters for Asthma UK found almost two-thirds have had an asthma attack at school. One in five children said they find it ‘quite difficult’ or ‘very difficult’ to access their inhaler at school and 55% do not always know where it is or how to get it.

Emily Humphreys, head of policy and public affairs at Asthma UK, said: ‘These medicines are very safe but going without them can be very dangerous, so it is crucial that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) changes the rules and allows schools to keep a spare inhaler as a last resort.

‘The majority of children know to find a teacher if they don’t have their own inhaler when having an asthma attack at school but the reality is that there is very little that staff can legally do to help in this situation. The charity says the MHRA could provide an exemption to the regulations to allow schools across the UK to supply the inhalers.

Similar exemptions already exist for organisations such as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and the armed forces.

Stephen McPartland, Conservative MP for Stevenage, said: ‘The tragic case of Stockport schoolboy Samuel Linton, who died in 2007 following an asthma attack at school, shows that there is a real lack of understanding and awareness as to what to do if a child has an asthma attack whilst they are at school.

‘This is why this campaign is so crucial, not only in terms of giving teachers access to an emergency inhaler but also empowering them with understanding, awareness and support in how to deal with asthma at school.’

Dr Kevin Gruffydd Jones, from the Primary Care Respiratory Society (PCRS-UK), said: ‘Asthma attacks are serious and children need access to inhalers as soon as possible. ‘Introducing a spare inhaler for emergencies could prevent a serious asthma attack by getting prompt help for a child when it’s needed.’

A spokesman for the MHRA said: ‘In the interests of patient safety, asthma inhalers should only be supplied on prescription to the individual named, for his or her own use. ‘The MHRA has no plans to change the current legal position.

‘Exemptions exist because of the nature of the conditions in which these organisations operate. For example, the conditions in which military operations are undertaken will tend to mean that access to medical care or advice may not be readily available.’

Sam Linton’s parents, Paul and Karen Linton, said: ‘Sam was a wonderful son and his loss has been devastating. The past few years have been horrendous, especially in the knowledge that things could, and should, have been different. ‘The thought that his death may have been prevented with better training and clearer policies is too much to bear. ‘Our family has suffered enormously since Sam’s death and we know our lives will never be the same again.

‘We only hope that serious lessons have been learned by all schools so that no one else has to suffer what we have been through so that our son’s death is not in vain.’

Jonathan Betts, from law firm Irwin Mitchell, which represents the Linton family, said: ‘If left untreated, asthma attacks can have devastating consequences. ‘A simple national policy would help, which instructs teachers to call an ambulance if a child suffers an asthma attack and is not showing signs of improvement within five to 10 minutes.

‘If easing the restrictions on schools stocking spare inhalers helps prevent further tragedy in future then we wholeheartedly support it.’

SOURCE