Wednesday, 22nd September 2010
The air around the greens turns blue
2:52pm
The lowering cloud that is Britain’s public spending cuts may have an unexpected silver lining. TheGuardian reports:
Climate change secretary Chris Huhne is fighting to defend his department's funding and independence, fending off a suggestion that his civil servants should be moved to the Treasury to cut costs... when all government departments were asked to model the effect of 40% cuts over the summer, officials at Decc [Department of the Environment and Climate Change] told ministers that cuts of that level to its £3.2bn budget would make it unable to stand alone as a viable entity.
This is what some might call ‘turning a crisis into an opportunity’.
The cries of distress are particularly gratifying. Michael Jacobs, Gordon Brown’s special adviser on climate...
Tuesday, 21st September 2010
Selling the pass
10:28am
Four cheers for Sir Nicholas Wall, the plain-speaking President of the Family Division and the most senior judge in the English divorce courts. As the Times (£) reports today in its front-page splash, Sir Nicholas has laid it on the line for divorcing parents by delivering the home truths that so many have tried to conceal for so long. Singling out middle-class families for serious criticism, he condemned the way in which they so often use their children as ammunition in the bitter wars played out between them – with the mother, with whom the children typically live, often using her power over them to deny the children contact with their father. Sir Nicholas said:
...‘There is nothing worse, for most children, than for their parents to denigrate each other. To use the trite phrase, each parent represents
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