A number of papers (Times, Telegraph, Mail) summarise the findings of the latest British Social Attitudes survey as showing that Britain has become a more ‘conservative’ nation, while others highlight the fact that it is now also more socially ‘liberal’ as revealing a fundamental contradiction (Independent,Guardian) This surely illustrates a fundamental confusion over current thinking and particularly over the understanding of ‘conservatism’. The source of the confusion is the fact that on the one hand, a greater number think of themselves as Conservative than Labour supporters (32 /27 per cent); only two in five want more spending on public services such as health and education, the lowest level since 1984, or want greater redistribution of income from rich to poor compared with more than half of the public in 1994; but on the other... The first is a letter to the Times from a former Metropolitan Police Commander, Keith Hunter. He writes, in the wake of the Edlington child torture case: I witnessed and experienced the transition from strict enforcement of 1930s child protection legislation, exercised only by the police and NSPCC, to care, counselling and supervision, led by heads of newly formed social service departments. From the 1960s onwards, as a senior police officer, I saw that multi-agency initiatives brought with them as many disadvantages as advantages. The enforced taking of a back seat by police soon led to their infection by theory and ideology-driven approaches, to the extent that many began to share the prevailing distaste for stricter, quicker, authoritative intervention. This was always The anti-war brigade are wetting themselves in excitement over this week’s billed appearances at the Chilcot inquiry of the Foreign Office legal advisers during the run-up to the Iraq war, Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst. We are being told with breathless anticipation that they are likely to say that they thought the war was illegal. Well, golly gosh and hold the front page. Talk about old news. We have known for years that they thought this; indeed, Wilmshurst very publicly resigned her position on the eve of the war because she thought it was illegal. So what? For sure, it will be very interesting to know why they came to this conclusion: Wilmshurst’s much-displayed resignation letter said merely that she would not go over the argument again because it was so well-known in the Foreign Office. However,... Christopher Booker reports in the Sunday Telegraph that, following the IPCC’s grovelling admission that its 2007 statement that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis and that its inclusion in the report reflected a ‘poor application’ of IPCC procedures, more has come to light about the bogus ‘research’ on which the IPCC based this claim – which came from a report in New Scientist which was in turn merely drawn from a phone interview with a little-known Indian scientist, and that scientist’s links with the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri: 
Tuesday, 26th January 2010
This Sceptred Isle (2)
11:59am
This Sceptred Isle
11:03am
Three items in today’s papers have caught my eye as nailing the current state of Britain.
...Monday, 25th January 2010
Did cannabis damage the Edlington child sadists in utero?
4:20pm
A propos my remarks in the Daily Mail this morning about the Edlington child torture case, and in particular the fact that the mother of the child sadists had fed them cannabis to keep them quiet, the anti-drugs campaigner Mary Brett makes the following hugely important point: Prenatal exposure to cannabis could be a factor in the development of the brains of the brothers if their mother used cannabis while pregnant. One long-term study from 1978, still running, by Peter Fried (Canada) found that children aged 6 showed increased symptoms of ADHD if their mothers had smoked 6 or more joints/week. Another long-term study by Goldschmidt et al in 2002 reported children, again at 6, displaying incidents of delinquent behaviour and at 10, the relationship between marijuana smoking in pregnancy and delinquency was established. In 2007 two papers,
...'Legality is what the Foreign Office lawyers say it is' -- discuss...
3:31pm
The Intergovernmental Perjury over Climate Catastrophe (ctd)
2:30pm
...the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and
...
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
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