We are causing Earth's 'sixth great extinction event'

A review, published in the journal Conservation Biology, shows that human activity in one way shape or form is driving species to extinction in the Southern Hemisphere.

Richard Kingsford, at the University of New South Wales says, "Much of it [natural environment] is being destroyed before our eyes. Species are being threatened by habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, climate change, over-exploitation, pollution, and wildlife disease".

Proof if any were needed that we need to urgent action to reduce carbon emissions and pollution, as well as limiting land clearing, logging, and mining; restricting deliberate introduction of invasive species; and limiting fisheries.

It is demand in the Northern Hemisphere, and in particular the industrialised countries that drives these destructive activities.

We must counter all the naysayers and climate "sceptics" soon otherwise there will not be much of a planet left for our grandchildren to inherit.

Curriculum tsar vows to make school more 'business friendly'

Those words in today's Independent sent a chill down my spine. Education is not supposed to provide foot-soldiers for business.

I believe that the job of schools and education in general, is best expounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in "Emile", namely that all children are perfectly designed organisms, ready to learn from their surroundings so as to grow into virtuous adults.

I really can't take the words of Andrew Hall, the new head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency that seriously, given that he apparently rejected a teaching career for accountancy.

What you need is MORE people in education who love, respect, and cherish children rather than be worried about double entry book-keeping.

Maybe I should send him a copy of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed?

Why is Jeremy Clarkson such an obnoxious little oik?

For once I actually don't have an answer, I genuinely, truly, madly, deeply want to know.

He (Jeremy Clarkson) epitomises ALL that is wrong with modern Britain, the incivility, the bullying, the thuggery, the total idiocy masquerading as blunt-speaking.

Whatever, one thinks of Gordon Brown, and I certainly am not a fan, to call him the c-word in public, is an insult too far.

Please Auntie starve this gobby sub-golf club wiseacre of the oxygen of publicity, however much money he brings in in overseas sales.

Privit Edukashen - III

A report by Alan Milburn (Unleashing Aspiration) released today says that top professions like medicine and law are increasingly being closed off to all but the most AFFLUENT families.

Note, the most affluent, not the brightest and the best, but the wealthiest.

We must work to close the gap between talent and privilege, we need a far fairer society where everyone gets an opportunity to contribute to the best of their abilities and is not excluded because of an accident of birth.

The full report is available from the Cabinet Office website as a PDF file (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/227102/fair-access.pdf), well worth the reading.

'never had it so good'?

Fifty years back Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told us we'd never had it so good, and in crude economic terms the trend has continued.

However, one question still remains, "why does health within a population get progressively worse further down the socio-economic scale?"A cracking book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (The Spirit Level), not only tries to answer this question, but comes up with even more profound findings, namely that in countries where there is a big gap between the incomes of rich and poor, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity, and teenage pregnancy are more common, the homicide rate is higher, life expectancy is shorter, and children's educational performance and literacy scores are worse.

Where incomes are relatively equal, there are high levels of trust, people feel secure, and see others as co-operative. In unequal societies, the rich suffer from fear of the poor, while the poor look upon the rich with bitterness and on themselves with shame.

Sadly, over the past dozen years the Labour government has only maintained inequality at the level at which it inherited it.

Credit where credit is due, there have been some moves for the better at the bottom income levels for pensioners and young families, but the problem is at the other end. Remember Mandy saying, "We're relaxed about people getting filthy rich"?

We Lib Dems believe in freedom, fairness, and trust.

Privit edukashen - II

I appreciate that some of you reading the previous post may have seen it as a bit of a rant, and for that I apologise.

I really shouldn't post late at night, however the central premise I still hold, namely that private education seeks merely to entrench and widen privilege based on class and wealth.

Now I readily admit that there are some benefits to those who go through, but at what price and at what cost to whom?
Indeed, some of my best friends have had a private education, and don't seem the worse for it, as indeed has my party leader.
I re-iterate I want the BEST education for ALL of our children.
The figures speak for themselves, just 7% of the population are educated at a private school, they then go on to provide half of the intake at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
From there it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to the heart of the establishment.

Nearly three quarters of judges, about a third of FTSE 100 chief executives, half of all senior journalists, and a third of MPs are privately schooled.

Of course ALL of us want the best for our children, in education, in health, and in life in general, but NEVER at the expense of another child's life chances.

Only when the state education system is so good that the accepted wisdom is: "You were educated privately? What a shame. State schools are SO much better!" can we be satisfied.

Privit edukashen, a waist of munny?

Private schools cheat the taxpayer out of millions of pounds under the guise of being charities, though what good they do society at large has forever escaped me.

The Tory front-bench is famously full of privately-educated bods, as is Boris Johnson the Mayor of London, though it is sometimes difficult to see what good it's done them apart from providing with a social cachet and the ability to spot each other at fifty paces.

Look at the sentence below from the Mayor's warning on business rates. Boris says: "Watching the hoards stream over London Bridge..."Oh dear! Oh dear! Johnson see the beak after class for substandard work.

A hoard is a hidden or secret supply or fund, and in archaeology a cache of valuable objects or artefacts; as in treasure trove. A horde, however, is a wandering tribe of nomadic people (originally Tatars as in the Golden Horde) migrating for the sake of plunder. Generally nowadays used to mean a large number of people.
I suppose we should be grateful he didn't use another homophone, whored.

If I was Boris's dad, I'd ask Eton to return his tuition fees.

There is something fundamentally un-British about private education something grubby where daddy's ill-gotten wealth is used to push junior to the front of the queue.

It's just not cricket!

I am passionate about the best education for ALL our children, not educational apartheid and division based on wealth, faith, or perceived academic ability at age 11.

Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela!

Today is Nelson Mandela's 91st birthday and also Mandela Day.
Nelson Mandela has fought for social justice for 67 years, and so the campaign is asking people to start with 67 minutes.

Today should bring together people around the world to fight poverty and promote peace and reconciliation.

Well I'll be on a stall in Todmorden doing my bit, not much I know, but every little helps.

BoJo - Some chicken some neck

Keep repeating to yourself "Tories aren't Toffs, Tories aren't Toffs".
Lovable (?) buffoon, Classicist, adulterer, Old Etonian, former Tory Shadow Front-bencher (twice), ex-MP for Henley, Boris "Boom Boom" Johnson, has revealed that £140,000 for running our nation's capital as its Mayor is not enough.

I know we're all having to tighten our belts in these straitened times, and some people have to hold down more than one job to make ends meet, but this is ridiculous.
He allegedly gets paid £250,000 for a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph.

That's right, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, sterling.

I'll do some maths for you that's fifty columns, so about £5,000 a piece, at about a 1,000 words that works out to £5 a word, or a pound a letter.
I repeat a pound a letter.
Now, I'm not a fan of Johnson's, nor the Daily Telegraph, nor yet its tax exile billionaire owners, the Barclay Twins, and what they do with their money is their business.
But what really galls, what sticks in my craw, is Johnson's asinine comment that the fee he receives as a lickspittle wordsmith is... "chickenfeed".

* Ten times the national average wage, is "chicken feed".
* Enough to house, clothe, and feed TEN ordinary hard working British families, is "chickenfeed".
* The Old Age Pension is £95.25, Johnson gets paid, for one column mind, what a pensioner gets for a YEAR. That's "chickenfeed".
* The minimum wage is £5.73 an hour, Johnson gets paid the national minimum wage for writing one letter. ONE LETTER. And that's "chickenfeed".
* A small infant school costs around £250,000 a year to run, that's what Johnson gets, "chickenfeed".

Remember that, next time you think what a nice bloke that Dave Cameron is, and that you'll give him a chance, and trust him with your vote.
Remember the Tories, and their backwardness, their arrogance, their smug self-righteous superiority, their lack of knowledge of and feeling for ordinary folk.

Bastille Day - pleasant exercise of hope and joy

Today is Bastille Day, and I am celebrating as ever.
I've just bought a croissant and the coffee pot is on the boil, I've even treated myself to a copy of Libé, well a couple of pages off the Libération webpage.
Anyway I digress.

I love "le quatorze juillet", I love the republican feel, I love its symbolism as an act of rebellion, I love the fact that a few weeks later feudalism was abolished, and a couple of weeks after that, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was proclaimed.

I shall make a nice cassoulet for my wife and boys for tea tonight. I know it's really a winter dish, but the weather is pretty overcast today.

When we've put the boys to bed, I think we'll watch Casablanca. I just love the bit when everyone in Rick's Cafe, of all colours and nationalities join in with singing the Marseillaise, and drown out Nazis.

It still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

Srebrenica - "People are not little stones"

Today is the anniversary of the most horrific atrocity on European soil in my lifetime, namely the genocide at Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia.

In July 1995 more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed, and 25,000-30,000 refugees were "ethnically cleansed" in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by units of the Army of Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladić.

The presiding judge at the Hague said, "The Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica... They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity".

The Srebrenica massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II. It was and remains a shameful stain on the conscience of Europe.

We must never allow such barbarity to occur again, and by strengthening the European Union and embedding democracy across Europe, we will go a long way to achieving this goal.

Nick Griffin-what an arse!

Honestly, how crap do you have to be when even European fascists don't want to sit with you? Oh yes, when you are the BNP!

News comes that having been elected to the European Parliament, he cannot find enough European MEPs to sit with him and Andrew Brons.

Instead the Italian neo-fascists, the Greek far-right, the Slovak xenophobes, and various anti-Semites, feel that the BNP is beyond the pale and would rather sit with UKIP (whose members are old-fashioned "golf club" bigots).
This is UKIP, who in the last European Parliament lost two of its members because of fraud!

The Italian Lega Nord leader Umberto Bossi described African immigrants as "bingo-bongos".
The leader of the Greeks in this group challenged the Israeli ambassador in Greece to come and discuss the "Auschwitz and Dachau myth", and claimed that "the Pope and the Jews are conspiring against Greece" and suggested that "the Jews" were responsible for the September 11 attacks.
The Slovaks in this motley crew are the SNS who are a "political party which incites or attempts to stir up racial or ethnic prejudices and racial hatred".
Their leader Ján Slota once said the best policy for dealing with the Roma was "a long whip in a small yard". He is quoted as saying "we will sit in our tanks and destroy Budapest" and that "The Hungarians are a cancer in the body of the Slovak nation".

Let me remind you that this lot REFUSED to sit with the ridiculous "Laurel and Hardy" of the Fascist world.

Griffin, "would be Fuhrer of the BNP", has been a Tory, a revolutionary nationalist, a radical National Socialist, a Third Positionist, a friend of the boot boys and the skinhead scene, and a man committed to respectable politics.

He has however, kept his links with the far right in Europe and America, where he has spoken on platforms with white supremacists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, and Holocaust-deniers. He is obsessed with a coming race war and has called for adults to keep "in their homes a standard-issue military assault rifle and ammunition".
Well this week he outdid himself when talking about African immigration to Europe, when he said "The only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration... is to get very tough with those coming over... Frankly, they need to sink several of those boats".

How Christian of him, the jumped up little oik!

The current state of Britain...

Labour have now been in government for more than a dozen years.
This government started with so much hope, (do you remember "Things can only get better"? I do) but now we are left with so much disappointment.
Labour has wasted its opportunities and wasted your money.
They've invested in health and education but lacked the courage that would have allowed them to spend it effectively.
They've failed to build a fairer society and instead inequality has increased and social mobility fallen.
They're the party of redistribution but in the wrong direction.

Above all they will be remembered for going to war in Iraq. It was an illegal war waged on false claims. Labour may have taken the decision to go to war but the Tories voted it through.

Even before the current Economic Crisis, the gap between rich and poor is now wider than at any time than under Mrs T.

Shame!

A dozen years of a Labour Government and the inequality gap is still widening

We all know that the Tories are for the well-off, viz Tory MPs' moats, duck houses, caviar-stuffed foie gras (okay, I made that last one up), but one thing we all knew (sic) was that Labour was for cutting the gap between the rich and the poor.
In fact the last time that happened was under the Wilson/Callaghan government of the 1970s.

However, thanks to a fellow councillor and statistics supplied by the Left Economics Advisory Panel:
* 13.2m people live in poverty, including 2.1m pensioners and 3.9m children.
* Over 20% are officially income poor, in 1979 it was 13%. However, 58% of British Asian and 40% of Black British people are income poor.
* The poorest 20% of the population pay nearly 40% of their total income in taxes, compared to 34.8% for the richest 20%.
* At 17% of average earnings, the UK state pension is the lowest in Europe (the EU average is 57%!)
* The gender pay gap is 17% for full-time work and 38% for part-time work.
* If unemployment benefit had kept pace with earnings, Job Seeker’s Allowance would be over £100/week today. Instead, it is £64.30 or £50.95 for under-25s.
* Executive pay has risen at 7 times the rate of the average worker.
* Tax havens cost the Exchequer at least £18bn annually.

A total and shambolic failure of Social Justice policies by Labour. Oh and what do the Tories recommend? Removing Inheritance Tax for millionaires.